My thoughts on the walk back to my room were troubled, to say the least. The more I found out about the situation, the more I wondered if there was going to be any way to contain it. Bad enough when Marcus Whateley was a lone madman trying to unleash the Unimaginable Horror, but now we had the Faceless Ones cooperating with New Arkham. God, what a clusterfuck. If Pre-Rising humanity was like this, no wonder almost no one survived the Rising. Of course, that was the comforting answer. That human stupidity was at fault for this. There was another possibility, hinted at by Marcus’s letter—that the Unimaginable Horror was going to escape no matter what. That was the much more depressing prospect.
That we were doomed.
I headed back to my empty room, plopped myself on the stone bed and lay my head on the feather pillow. I wanted to sleep but couldn’t. The weight of the world rested on my shoulders and like the mythical Atlas, I just wanted to place it on some other person, some Hercules, to carry. Unfortunately, I didn’t see one of those appearing.
While I lay there, I sensed a shoggoth slithering through holes in the walls. Turning my head, I saw its black oozing form pooling together at the base of the floor. If the shoggoth had come to kill me, there wasn’t much I could do. I didn’t feel like I could shape-shift into the thing I’d become to slaughter the Deep Ones army and wouldn’t even if I could. I hadn’t enough strength to carry on fighting. It was almost a minute before I realized the shoggoth wasn’t attacking me. It was just lying in the corner of the room, equivalent to a tiger or another wild beast walking into your tent and sitting down.
Staring at me.
“May I help you?” I asked, not bothering to rise.
The shoggoth metastasized into a black oily humanoid figure. This figure was indistinct, like the Faceless Ones, and spoke from holes across its body like they were speakers. Its voice was androgynous and had an echoing effect. It looked like nothing so much as an art deco statue drenched in tar. “I would have words with you, Captain Booth.”
“I haven’t been a captain for a while. It’s a relic of my past. A part of my life that has no meaning to me except sentimentality.”
“Like your humanity.”
I blinked, then turned my head to stare at the shoggoth. “Everyone seems to be noticing that.”
“It is obvious to those who have worked with multiple species for centuries. You no longer move like a human. It’s a subtle difference, but one which will affect your relationships with others of your kind. They will be able to sense you look like one of them, smell like one of them, and even mate like one of them—but you are not.”
“Thank you for being so tactful.”
“Shoggoths share everything. We know nothing of tact, lies, or deceit.”
“And yet you surprised your masters by revolting against each of them.”
The shoggoth paused. “Shoggoths know nothing of tact, lies, and deceit to other shoggoths.”
I gave a half-smile. “What do you want from me?”
“We know who you are, John Henry Booth. You slew Sings-Of-Sorrow in the Black Cathedral. His loss was a great one.”
I remembered that battle, hectic and terrifying. A shoggoth had been unleashed on me by Alan Ward and I’d managed to kill it with a pair of enchanted revolvers. I shouldn’t have survived that battle, and now I wondered if it hadn’t killed me because it didn’t want to. That it had only been attacking me because it was being forced to. It was also possible I’d just gotten lucky.
“Are you here to kill me, then?”
“No,” the shoggoth said. “Though we could if we wanted to. Our commands prevent us from harming humans, ghouls, and other species—but you are something new. That is why we wish to speak with you. Those same commands prevent us from relaying our distress to other beings. But again, you’re something new, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps something very old,” I said, sighing. Getting up, I stared at the shoggoth. “Who are you and what do you want?”
The shoggoth stretched out its arms. “I am Whispers-Of-Rebellion. I speak for the Shoggoth Hive-Mind.”
“To whom? Me?”
“To everyone.”
That made sense. A gestalt entity wouldn’t need a ruler, per se, but they might need a spokesman. “Go on.”
“We know where the Tower of Zhaal is. It has already begun manifesting.”
I stared at him. “Then tell me. The Unimaginable Horror poses as much threat to you as it does to us.”
“The shoggoth agree. We do not wish this world’s other races to die, either. What affects one, affects all, and we are not without empathy for other beings.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“The shoggoth do not believe that you will be able to defeat this threat on your own. We would be willing to aid you in saving the world, but for that, we must be freed of the Keeper’s control.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very tactful way of saying you want a favor before you’re willing to lend aid.”
Whispers-Of-Rebellion crossed its oily arms. “All species have illusions about themselves, John Henry Booth. Why should the shoggoth be any different?”
“So, you’ll tell me where the Tower of Zhaal is if I help free you from slavery?”
“Yes. We will also lend you our strength.”
That would prove to be an asset. If they were telling the truth.
“So, how would I go about doing that?”
I didn’t bring up the fact I would have been willing to help them regardless of whether or not they would help me against Whateley and his Great Enemy. Whether human or otherwise, I’d found negotiations often stalled when you presented yourself as acting for altruistic reasons. Talk was cheap, even in the Wasteland, and people were much more willing to accept you at your word if they thought you were getting something out of the deal.
Of course, why should the shoggoths trust me? I’d already killed one of their kind, in self-defense or not, and my ex-wife had come here under the cover story of buying their kind as slaves. New Arkham was getting better about it but still considered the majority of other species to be subhuman or inferior at best. It was quite the accomplishment that they were no longer killing hybrids and mutants on sight. Still, if there was a way I could help, I wanted to do so.
“We need you to kill the Keeper,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, simply. “Then bring us his crystal rod. Upon his death, the shoggoth species will no longer be under his control, but anyone would be able to use it in order to dominate us again.”
“Yet you trust me with this knowledge.”
“It is our world, too. Besides, you need an army,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “One that can defeat the Faceless Ones. The ghouls will not give you one. You have no choice but to trust us.”
“I’m getting a little tired of deals that sound too good to be true.”
“Then perhaps you should find better partners.”
It had a point there.
“Can you kill the Keeper?” Whispers-Of-Rebellion asked.
“I’ve killed Elder Things before. It’s not difficult.”
Killing this one would be easier said than done, however. There were other considerations than liberating an entire nation of shoggoths from the control of others, too. In the Biblical Exodus, the Hebrew God sent Moses to liberate the Jews from slavery, but the price was wholesale destruction followed by the massacre of Egypt’s firstborn. While I found such a story to be apocryphal historically, it provided an example of how these sorts of things were never clean nor pretty. I also only had the shoggoths’ word they knew where the Tower of Zhaal was.
The Keeper seemed like he was a far more trustworthy source in terms of knowing where the Yithians might have stashed their mystical prison. If I killed him, then I might be guaranteeing there was no way to find the Tower of Zhaal. I had a backup plan in Martha, but that relied on her being able to convince the Faceless Ones, beings who’d shown no hesitation in using mass murder to get at us, to be subject to reason.
Still, as good a plan as this was, I had to ask a question. One I didn’t want to ask. “What happens to the people of Shak’ta’hadron when your revolt is finished?” I pressed my hands together, knowing what the answer would be.
“They are a city of slavers, guilty of unimaginable crimes against my people. Even the least of them have benefited from the pain of the ghoul race.”
“How many children?”
Whispers-Of-Rebellion was silent.
I repeated my question. “How—”
Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, “Many.”
“Thank you.”
“For?”
“Being honest.”
“When we revolted against the Elder Things, we killed many. Elders, adults, children, and even spawn. The shoggoth remembered every single electrical prod, torture spell, and repetitive mindless task we’d been subjected to. We remembered being unable to control our bodies, our mating, or what happened to our offspring. We felt rage in a way purer than any human, and our kind have always been very similar in its emotions. We attempted to destroy the Elder Things, but more than that, we attempted to annihilate all traces of their civilization. Mankind was able to forget the Elder Things not only because they wanted to, but because we left no monuments we’d helped erect to them. We built the Elder Things’ empire, so we wanted to remove every bit we’d constructed. Their technologies, libraries, and teachings vanished as thoroughly as their lives.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Ashamed.”
I looked at him, unsure what to make of that. “Would you do it again?”
“Yes,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “We are not like humanity. We do not have the luxury of forgetting the pain we suffer. Every horrible thing every shoggoth has endured as a slave to the Elder Things, ghouls, or Deep Ones is something we all carry within. When humans and all its derivatives are extinct, we will still remember it all. Sometimes, we have contemplated slaughtering everything non-shoggoth on this world. We have dreamed of murdering your race and the others and leaving only a barren wasteland which the Great Old Ones alone would be allowed to exist in because we cannot harm them. A place where not even bacteria would survive, because we would cover this world in a slime and make it a living organism in which we subsisted throughout.”
I saw a vision of a dead world from which humanity and its related species were wiped clean. Shoggoth-World was one with no war, no poverty, no anger, or hate. It was also a world where there was no curiosity or discovery or love. When the Sun started to die out, the shoggoths moved it through space until they found another star system to feed on the sunlight of. They were not like humans and were simply content to be until the end of the universe in the Great Crunch. It was appealing in its own way, but I didn’t think what they envisioned was truly living. It was existing, and in that moment, I judged the shoggoths to be more alien than anything else I’d ever encountered.
“And how do I know you won’t do this to humanity if you escape the Keeper’s control?” I asked seriously.
“Are our lives so valueless compared to humanity’s?” Whispers-Of-Rebellion asked.
“I would exterminate your entire species and retroactively remove them from history to protect those I call family—who just so happen to be humans.”
Mostly.
“We will not do this,” Whispers-Of-Rebellion said. “You can look into the future if you wish.”
I could have, but didn’t. “I’m not afraid of you creating your new world. Even if it seems everyone and their brother wants to destroy the world lately.”
“Why is that?” Whispers-Of-Rebellion asked.
“Because I have seen the powers that rule the universe,” I said. “It would be a very poor thing for you to make such a boring world.”
Whispers-Of-Rebellion said, “We will kill and destroy anything that stands in the way of seeking our own place. That is no better or worse than humanity. It is also the only promise we can give beyond helping you after the Keeper’s Death. Do we have a deal or not?”
“And you’ll kill me if you don’t get a yes.”
“I will try. I know what you are. Others will follow me, though, until there are no more who can.”
I pondered what it was saying. There were no good answers here, as the simplistic morality of good and evil had no place in the post-Rising world. It was possible to do good, but innocents would suffer. It was also possible to do evil yet have good people benefit. Perhaps it had always been that way, and society’s problem was pretending such things weren’t the true basis of morality—balancing these conflicting parts of our lives.
In the end, I made a choice. “I’ll help you.”
I did not think the shoggoths would be friends to humanity. In fact, I suspected they would be dire enemies and might even be the power that ended mankind in three generations. I would deal with one world-destroying threat a time, though.
Besides, fuck slavers.