Nightingale lament

We were almost half-way across the hall before we got our first glimpse of what was waiting for us. At the far end, in the darkest of the shadows, barely illumi­nated by the light of the swirling mists, were five huge figures. The corpsicles. Thawed from unimaginable cold, revived from the dead, reanimated by abhuman spirits from Outside, they didn't look human any more. The forces that possessed the vacant bodies were too strong, too furious, too other for merely human frames to contain. They had all grown and expanded, forced into u

We were getting too close. I grabbed Dead Boy by the arm and made him stop. He glared at me.

"We need information," I murmured. "Talk to them."

"You talk to them. Find me something useful I can hit."

One of the shapes leaned forward. It was twice as tall as a man, and almost as wide, its pale, sweating skin stretched painfully tight. A head craned forward on the end of a long, extended neck. Bloody tears fell con­stantly, to hiss and steam on the hall floor. Bone horns and antlers thrust out of the distorted face, and, when it spoke, its voice was like a choir of children whispering obscenities.

"We are The Primal. Purely conceptual beings, prod­ucts of the earliest days of creation, before the glory of ideas was trapped and diminished in the narrow con­fines of matter. Kept out of the material worlds, to pro­tect its fragile creatures of meat and mortality. Ever since Time was, we were. Waiting and watching at the Edge of things, searching eternally for a way in, to fi­nally show our contempt and hatred for all the lesser creations, that dare to dream of being more than they are. We are The Primal. We were here first. And we will be here when all the meat that dares to think has been stamped back into the mud it came from."

"Typical bloody demons," said Dead Boy. "Created mille

"Can you at least try for a more rational attitude?" 1 said sharply. And then I broke off, as the head turned suddenly to look at me.

"We know you, little prince," said the choir of whis­pering voices. "John Taylor. Yes. We know your mother, too."

"What do you know about her?" My mouth was painfully dry, but I fought to keep my voice steady.

"She who was first, and will be first again, in this worst of all possible worlds. She's coming back. Yes. Soon, she will come back."

"But who is she? What is she?"

"Ask the ones who called her up. Ask the ones who called her back. She is coming home, and she will not be denied."

"You're scared of her," I said, almost wonderingly. And you're scared of me, too, I thought.

"We are The Primal. There is still time to play in the world, before she comes back to take it for her own. Time to play with you, little prince."

"This is all terribly interesting," said Dead Boy. "But enough of the chit-chat. Back me up, John. I have a plan."

And he ran forward and threw himself at the nearest shape.

"That's your idea of a plan?" I shrieked, and plunged after him, because there was nothing else to do. It's times like this I wish I carried a gun. A really big gun. With nuclear bullets.

Dead Boy reached out to grab the extended head of the speaking Primal, and its whole body surged suddenly forward to engulf and envelop him, holding him firm like an insect in amber. It wanted to possess him, but Dead Boy was already possessing his body, and his curse didn't allow room for anyone else. The Primal convulsed and spat him out, repulsed by his very na­ture. Dead Boy hit the floor hard, but was back on his feet in a moment, looking around for something he could hit. The Primal raised their voices in a terrible harmony, chanting something in a language full of higher things than words. And the reanimated dead plastered across the walls heard them. They slipped slowly down the walls and slid across the floor towards Dead Boy and me, a sea of body parts oozing and un­dulating towards us from all directions, spitting and seething and sprouting distorted limbs like weapons. Stomach acids burned the wooden floor. Eyeballs rose up on wavering stalks. Hands flexed fingers with nails long as knives, sharp as scalpels.

I grabbed two handfuls of salt from my jacket pocket and scattered it in a wide circle around Dead Boy and myself, yelling to him to stay inside it. I wasn't sure even his legendary invulnerability would stand up to being torn apart and digested in a hundred undead stomachs. The oozing biomass hesitated at the salt, then formed itself into high, living arches to cross over it. I glared about me, while Dead Boy slapped and punched at the nearest extensions of the biomass. He was shouting all kinds of spells, from elvish to corrupt Coptic, but none of them had any obvious effect. The reanimated tissues were charged with the energies of The Primal, forces old when the world was new, and even Dead Boy had never come across anything like this before.

I looked at The Primal. They were watching me, rather than Dead Boy, and I remembered my original insight, that they'd seemed almost afraid of me. Why me? What could I do to hurt them? I didn't even have the few battle magics Dead Boy had. There was my gift of finding, but I didn't see it being much use just then. Think, think! I looked hard at the five distorted bodies possessed by The Primal. They looked horrible, yes, but also . . . strained, stretched thin, unstable. Human bodies weren't meant to hold Primal essences. Maybe all the pressure within needed was a little extra nudge...

I was off and ru

I'd been too much for The Primal to manage. My body was still tenanted, soul intact, and The Primal couldn't cope. Something had to give, and it turned out to be the possessed body. It blew apart in a wet, sticky explosion, like a grenade inside a small furry creature, and the violence of the explosion ruptured the integrity of the four other bodies, setting them off like a row of firecrackers. It was all over in a moment, and Dead Boy and I stood looking around us, drenched in blood and gore, surrounded by a sea of unmoving body parts, al­ready rotting and falling apart. Dead Boy looked at me.

"And people say I'm impulsive and hard to get along with. What did you just do to them?"

"I think I gave them indigestion. And, possibly, I am a bit special, after all."