The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [131]
"I can't see any broken bones. Not that it matters if that thing's driven her mad."
"Pick her up," said the Vermiform.
I did so and Cyan jolted awake, gasped, open-mouthed. "Jant? What are you doing here?"
"Just keep still." The Vermiform sprang up from under my feet and wrapped around us. More worms appeared, adding to the thread, beginning at my ankles then up to my waist, binding us tightly together.
Cyan waggled her head at the deserted tundra. She screamed, "Do you have to follow me everywhere? Even into my nightmares?"
The worms nearest her face grouped together into a hand and slapped her.
Cyan spluttered, "How dare ― !"
The hand slapped her again, harder.
"Thanks," I said.
A horse burst from the ground, bent forelegs first. It pawed the grass without touching it. Its enormous rear hooves paced apart. Long hair feathered over them; its fetlock bones swayed as it put its weight on them and reared.
Cyan wailed, "What does it want?"
Its fore hooves gouged the air, its long head turned from side to side. It couldn't understand what we were. It sensed us, with whatever senses it had, and it shrieked at us. It could not know its own power nor regulate its voice to our level. It gave us its full unearthly scream, right into my face.
The Vermiform tightened around my legs.
Its tongue curled, its jaw widened, it was bone; no tongue but the jaw dotted with holes for blood vessels and peaks for ligament connections. Its incisors clamped together, the veins appeared running into the bone, the muscles flowered and rotting horseflesh became a whole beast again. It turned its mad, rolling eye on me. Sparks crackled over us, tingling. Hounds and horses began springing up around us. No soil stuck to them; they had treated the earth as if it was another form of air.
The horse arched its neck. I looked up into the convoluted rolled cartilage in its nasal passages. Its jutting nose bones thrust towards me, its jaw wide to bite my face. Slab teeth in living gums came down ―
― The Vermiform snatched us away ―
Its coils withdrew and dropped me on a hard surface. I sat up and crowed like a cock, "Hoo-hoo! That was a neat move, Worm-fest!"
Beside me Cyan crawled and spat. I helped her up: "Are you all right?"
"Jant, what are you doing here?"
"I've come to rescue you."
"Rescue me? Sod off! What just happened? Did you see those horse things? .Argh! Worms! .What the fuck are these worms?"
"Allow me to introduce you to the Vermiform," I said. It was writhing around my feet in a shapeless mass. If it had been human, it would have been panting.
"We must keep going," it chorused.
Cyan said, "A horse was lying down and it seemed friendly. I climbed on its back. I didn't know that was going to happen. Oh, god, what is this place?"
A water drop landed on my head. Good question. I looked around and realised we were in a gigantic cavern, so vast I could not clearly see the other side.
The sound of a bustling market broke all around us. The stone walls rucked and soared up a hundred metres in the gloom, latticed with ledges from which bats dangled like plums. I gazed up to the roof, into vaults and rifts and wedding-cake tumbles of flowstone arching into darkness. The ceiling dazzled with circular gold and purple jewels. They were so lambent I was tempted to climb up and collect them until I realised they weren't gems embedded in the stone but water droplets hanging from it. They reflected the cool, blue light from the bulbous tails of Neon Bugs clinging to great trunks of suspended stalactites, bathing the whole chamber in their glow.
Market stalls were laid out in disorderly lines on the uneven floor, filling the cave, and up into a circular tunnel climbing slowly to the surface. Slake Cross town in all its entirety would fit into that passage. Stalls tangled along both sides of it like a thread of commerce linking the cave to Epsilon city's immense market a kilometre or more above us.
"It's Epsilon bazaar!" I said. I'd known