Apparently, your flight has taken you in a circle and returned you back again to the place from whence you departed.
Heartseeker has fallen from Vlana’s grasp and lies outside the ring of feeding ghouls, and you step forward to lift it, but even as you do, you feel a clammy hand fasten around your wrist, and the ghouls who were waiting on either side of the archway are suddenly upon you, pressing you to the ground, their cold teeth sinking into your warm flesh.
VIII
As more and more of the enormous crabs rise from the city streets, you realize that you didn’t sign on for this. You’d apologize to Samanda if you could, but your mouth is full of magic rock. Even as you dart past her, the claw of the enormous crab fastens around her waist, and the pebble is squeezed from her mouth. You take comfort in the knowledge that she’ll probably drown before the crabs can tear her apart.
The crabs are surprisingly quick for such huge beasts, and several times you have to deflect snapping claws with the blade of your sword. At the end of the lane, a creature so massive that it makes its brethren look regular-sized rises up before you, the entire end of the street yawning upward into a gargantuan blue carapace. Your blade licks out and slices off a wavering eyestalk, and then you’re stepping atop the monster even as it levers itself upward, and using its height to boost you onto the avenue above.
You find yourself in a broad thoroughfare lined with cyclopean pillars that must have once reached to the heavens, if this city ever existed above the waves. At its far end, you see the gates of some temple or fane. As you pass through, you discover that the interior is not an interior at all, but that some ancient cataclysm has rent the building, destroying the roof and bringing down most of the walls, so that the temple is now open to the sea and to a massive chasm that splits the seabed behind it. Here you find the throne of the Yellow King, and the King himself asleep upon it. Samanda was right when she hypothesized that the King might not be a man. What lies upon the throne is an enormous worm, fat as a maggot, its yellow flesh the color of infection.
Next to the throne is a heap of gold and jewels, and atop the heap the treasure that you seek, what can only be the Shining Trapezohedron. Black and shot through with red, it seems to call out to you, and you slip noiselessly across the temple floor toward your prize. You had believed that you might need Samanda’s skills to steal the stone, but it seems now that you may be stealthy enough after all, and you reach the pile of treasure without the King so much as stirring.
You reach out one shaking hand, close your fist around the Trapezohedron, and as you do so, you hear a sound behind you, a sound out of place in the soundless depths of the ocean. You turn, and you see that the worm that is the Yellow King terminates in a human face, and that face is directing its mocking laughter at you, and you realize that, while you’ve gotten what you came for, you’ve also fallen into a trap.
IX
You fight the unnatural pull of the mushrooms that surround you, and follow Ivrian through the strange fields of the Plateau. As you near the temple steps, however, you notice that the fungus seems to have shifted slightly. Each time you look away, the topography has changed when you look back. Before you can point the phenomenon out to Ivrian, one of the corpses tears itself free from its fungal bed and lunges at you. Your sword comes up and slices off an arm. The sensation is oddly repellent, not the clean bite of a normal blade cutting normal flesh.
All around you, the bodies within the fungus are rising up. Mushrooms in vivid blues and greens and purples burst from their bodies as they clamber, shamble, or even crawl toward you, and you know, even as you try to fend them off, that the fungus is what controls them, what makes them move, and that gives you an idea.
“Ivrian,” you shout, “their bones are still intact!”
And she, to her credit, sees what you mean immediately, plucks a fingerbone from the putrefying mass of the arm you just hacked off, and from it begins fashioning a hasty doll. In moments, one of the fungus people is fighting at your side, and shortly thereafter another has joined it, and then another.
The creatures are not formidable in combat, too slow and too soft, but they cannot be slain as any living foe can, by cutting off a head or stopping a heart. No matter what you do to them, they keep coming, and even with your reinforcements, you know that you won’t last long. You turn to Ivrian, to tell her that one of you has to make it to the temple, just in time to see two of the creatures hauling her down. You slash at them, reducing them to quivering masses, but by the time you reach her, it’s too late, she has already swallowed the fungus they jammed in her mouth.
She presses half-made dolls into your hands and tells you to go to the temple, that she’ll hold them off as long as she can. You consider trying to argue, but already her skin is taking on an unhealthy grayish tinge, and so you take the dolls and run.
The temple steps flash under your feet, and you don’t stop until you are beyond its golden doors, and those doors shut firmly behind you. You see that the temple is only a facade, that within it is open to the elements, and the back wall of the chamber is not a wall but a cliff that drops off into a gorge that seems to go down forever. Between you and the cliff there sits a golden throne, and upon it reclines the fattest man you have ever seen. His flesh hangs over itself in massive folds, like an avalanche of a person, a mountain of flesh that cascades ever down and down. Covering his face is a mask of yellow silk, and to either side of him stand guardians in golden masks, holding curved golden swords. In one of his massive hands, he holds what must be the Shining Trapezohedron, a black stone striated with red that seems to pull you toward it.
The Yellow King holds out the stone, as though inviting you to come take it, but as you start to move forward, so too do his twin guards. You glance down at the sword in your hand, and then at the dolls that Ivrian gave you. Hastily you begin shaping one of the dolls, pressing into its face a piece of gold prized from the door at your back. You hear the footsteps of the guards coming closer, and you use the doll as Ivrian taught you. When you look up, one of the guards has turned stiffly and cut the other down.
You smile in triumph as the guard whose strings you now hold turns and advances on his former master, and the Yellow King is silent even as the guard cuts off his hand so that the Trapezohedron rolls free. It is only as you pick it up that you realize why this came to you so easily. The moment you touch the stone, you feel its power, feel it drawing your gaze, gathering up your strings as readily as Ivrian ever did, and you realize that you are the puppet, and that you always were.