Cage of Souls, page 37
I looked down the monolithic line of columns and saw the light glint everywhere on glass, whole or broken. An endless sequence of parched and solitary mausoleums fell away on all sides of us, and I felt a bubbling horror rising within me.
“God,” I said heavily. “It’s a tomb…”
But it was worse than that. As I got over my revulsion and examined the next corpse, still intact behind its glass membrane, I saw the ends of machines arrayed around the horribly desiccated body. Panels, controls, meters that showed nothing and lights that were forever put out.
“Not death, but a sleep,” Sergei said softly. His strange accent made stranger echoes. “Probably it is some war, burning up the surface. They come here to be safe. Into machines they go, trusting when the war was won, their friends come wake them. Only the war was lost. Maybe everybody lost. Power died… In their sleep, their nightmares, they died too, over how long a time? The scavengers will not touch them; time has done its worst. They will lie here to the end of the world.”
We passed on, our footsteps echoing loud down the halls of the necropolis, amidst the remains of ancients who had died in ignorance of the end of their world. I was constantly on edge, seeing in the darkness all the things Giulia had spoken of. Our little line stopped often as one person or another heard some movement beyond the reach of our lamps. Pelgraine eventually became so twitchy up in front that Sergei took over. When the former point man stepped back to walk beside me, I heard Giulia mutter, “Prime Stabber territory,” and fumbled my one-shot out, for all the good it would do me.
Between the crypt-columns there was a quiet so intense that it could be heard, as though a single sound had been trapped in there when the place was built, a faint but eternal reverberation in the very structure of the place. Every scuff of a footstep, every exhalation, or scrape of crossbow-butt on stone, expanded out to join that almost-inaudible susurration.
We came across another rubble-strewn place where several ceilings had fallen in. There was a hill of shifting debris beneath which the occupants of downed pillars must have been pressed to dust. Sergei moved carefully up, testing each foothold. He reached ahead with one hand, pistol held clear with the other. I could hear his slightly laboured breath in the vast silence. Crouching spider-like atop the pile, he decided it was safe and beckoned for us to follow.
Of course I slipped. Needless to say, I was the one person who lost his footing and just slid off into the dark with a yelp. One moment I was picking my footholds, with Giulia ahead and Pelgraine behind. A second later my legs were whisked from under me and I was tobogganing off into the darkness, bounding off every piece of broken stone I crashed into. Through it all I was clutching the little one-shot so close to my chest that it was a wonder I didn’t shoot myself through the chin.
When I came to rest in a confusion of sharp masonry and my own flailing limbs, I could see the lights of the others only as a vague glow that threw the silhouettes of the pillars into sharp focus. I was suddenly alone and surrounded by the embalmed dead, unable to see anything but that detached illumination. I wanted to reach out and pull myself up, but then I envisaged putting my hand, all unwary, through the gap of a broken window, sinking my fingers into the crackling dry skin of a dead face. I froze up instantly, just staring towards the light.
The image that gripped me was of that body half-out of its alcove. How had it got there? Had some vermin laid hands on it, then decided it was inedible? Or had that withered ancient woken at the very end of its unnaturally prolonged life: woken, and tried desperately to escape the confines of the smothering machine. I saw, in my mind, those brittle-stick fingers clutching at the glass, forcing it out, shattering it. I saw the ghastly, dried body fall forwards, that one arm outstretched towards the stale air of the great necropolis… and if that could be so then perhaps some of those atrophied creatures were still alive. My thoughts conjured for me the silent snakeskin progress of one of them, freed from the confines of its machine and reaching out with wasted fingers…
“Stefan!” I heard Giulia shout, not for the first time, and I made a kind of cracked, scared bleat. I saw the shadows shift as a couple of the Fishermen cautiously advanced in my direction, and one of them threw a light towards me. It was just a stick with a bioluminant at one end, but I seized upon it as though it was life and brought it up to head height, whereupon it illuminated a head.
I screamed.
It was long-jawed and low-browed and the eyes were just plain white, but it must have registered the light somehow because it snarled and one long hand smashed the lamp from my hand and dashed it to darkness against a column. In the brief second between the reclosing of the dark and the twang of Giulia’s crossbow I was left with the image of a mouth gaping open to show dagger-like incisors. I felt the movement of something very fast past my face and heard a solid, fleshy impact. When the others rushed over, bringing back blessed light to the scene, the thing was lying in a boneless sprawl at my feet with the crossbow bolt between those featureless blank eyes. Given that Giulia had been firing at a remembered target in the dark I reckoned that was actually the closest I had come to dying.
The creature was… not a creature. It was a man, or more than the web-children would ever be. I would have thought that living underground would make for dwarfish, diminished life, but the thing would have been nearly as tall as Sergei had it stood upright. The arms were too long or the legs too short, and it could have gone on all fours with ease. The nails of the hands and feet were talons, the fingers and toes long and strong. It had no clothing, tools or possessions of any kind to suggest intelligence.
“Mazen,” Giulia exclaimed. “Crap.”
“Pelgraine, get the light gun out,” Sergei snapped out. “Everyone else ready. When did you last see only one Mazen?”
“What the hell is a Mazen?” I demanded. “You said Stabbers and spiders and maulers and whatever, but you never said anything about Mazen.”
We were retreating back to the mound of rubble, all the better for a good view of our surroundings. Giulia stayed close to me, and got out the story in brief snatches.
“We never knew they could get into here,” she stated. “I’ll have to update my maps.”
“Priorities please! What are they? As quickly and concisely as possible.”
“They’re people, Stefan,” she told me. “Or they were. Thousands of years back, supposedly, some of the Diggers built a whole city deep underground, far deeper than any of us have ever gone. Probably another war, a disaster or something. They all went to live down there, cut off from the surface, and then something went wrong. They ran out of power. Their machines broke down. A whole city-full of people, soldiers and civilians and politicians and scholars and workers and children, all trapped without light, heat, food…”
“They must have gone mad,” I whispered.
“Probably. Most of them. Most of them died. Maybe all but the maddest ones died. The mad ones were probably the ones who could adjust, because civilisation meant nothing to them. They lived without light or power, and they ate… anything, each other. That’s where the Mazen come from. The descendants, generations later. Bit by bit they found their way out of the city, always working upwards. There are four or five points where our worlds touch, and now I must add this one.”
“Are there any other people down here?” I asked her.
“No, and the Mazen haven’t been people since before Shadrapar was built. We are the only people down here.”
“The Shell People,” Charno suggested. He was setting up that immense crossbow on a three-legged stand.
“No such thing,” Giulia snapped. “Just a legend.”
Charno shrugged, and that was all I heard about the Shell People because the big man called me over and said, “Look, Stefan, you’d better load.”
“What?” I said, which was when the Mazen attacked. There was a sudden rustling in the darkness and the light began to fall on rushing shapes, some on two legs, some on four, glints of huge, vacant eyes and bared teeth. There was a shocking flash of light from behind us which illuminated everything and everywhere and froze the creatures with a great wailing cry. I heard Sergei’s gun go off, explosive in the echoing space, and a spatter of crossbows followed.
“Put them in, pointy end forward,” Charno snapped at me. There was a kind of a hopper at the top of his great crossbow, and with panicking fingers I fed bolts into it one by one. He was frantically turning a winch that dragged the string back, released and fired the bolt, then dragged it back again, over and over, while he pivoted the thing on its mount, spitting steel-tipped shafts into the dark after each searing flash of light. Beside us, Giulia steadily cranked the lever of her repeating bow back and forth, each movement slotting another missile into place and loosing it off. Her bolts were strung together on a kind of thin webbing that another Fisherman was carefully feeding to her, to stop it tangling. Behind us, Pelgraine fired the light gun at measured intervals. The Mazen looked blind, but the all-illuminating bursts of the light gun disoriented them, set them against one another, and in the aftershock of those bursts they were targets for the crossbows.
Sergei cast his pistol down and unslung a crossbow of his own, fitting a big-headed bolt to the string. “Fire!” he shouted, and the Fishermen suddenly covered their faces as he loosed. The bolt struck between two Mazen, as I saw clearly because I still had my eyes open. There was an explosion of blue fire from the impact that quite blinded me in a way the light gun had not, and I heard the screeching of Mazen with limbs torn off by the blast. My fingers kept working of their own accord, loading Charno’s bow as my eyes blinked and recovered.
There were a lot of them and they were fast. Charno was swinging the great bow in a wide arc as I struggled to keep it fed. He had given up aiming by then and was just pumping bolts out into the dark. Sergei fired off his second explosive bolt and then knelt quickly to reload his pistol, pressing the shells into their chambers with an unhurried, precise hand.
The light gun went off again, showing the Mazen closer than ever, and Pelgraine shouted, “I’m out!” Then a Mazen leapt at Charno from one side, clearing the heads of two crouching Fishermen in a single bound, but getting tangled up with me on the way. I was punched to the ground, and the thing’s filthy talons dug deep into one arm. I saw the jaws gape above me and tried to fold myself into a foetal position again, a process which brought both my knees sharply up between its legs. There was a shocked noise from the fanged maw, and then Pelgraine ran it through the ribs with a sword and cut its head off for good measure. There was other combat going on, but I stayed crouched down, clutching my one-shot, which had still not gone off. I fumbled the metal trigger guard away and directed it outwards. Then another Mazen sprang from behind and knocked Pelgraine back into Charno. One flailing, clawed foot raked across my leg, and I spasmodically fired the one-shot into its buttock. It screeched, and Charno gripped it by the head and, with a great effort, snapped its neck. Pelgraine, helmet gone, sat up and grinned at me. I realised that it had ended. It was over. The surviving Mazen had given up. All that was left were the dead, and the almost dead, which gave off a horrendous mewling that no human throat ever produced.
There were nineteen bodies or so sprawled about, jutting bolts or sporting burns and gunshot wounds. When I expressed surprise that there were not more, Giulia said that the survivors would have taken the rest. “They eat one way or another,” she said. “It’s probably the only thing that keeps the population down.”
“Casualties!” Sergei called, and someone told him, “Mitch is dead, Guy Borand’s next to. Pelgraine, Lombard and Stefan all got scratched.”
I scarcely registered my own name. The speaker was kneeling by two human bodies amongst the sub-human carnage. Guy Borand was the man who had carried me down most of the rope, and here he was, breathing his last with his lips rimmed with blood. I wanted to tell him that I was grateful, but my gratitude would not help him. Someone was trying to put something on my wounds, but I kept shaking them off, looking down at the dead.
“Stefan!” Giulia warned. “Mazen wounds go bad fast. You need this.” The unguent she was rubbing hard into my scratches burned where it touched. Pelgraine and the woman named Lombard were enduring the same treatment. Pelgraine was checking the workings of the light gun, an ancient, bronze-mounted piece of equipment with a wide, cloudy lens.
“The cell’s died,” he announced. “Better hope those Mazen have run a long way.”
In the distance, something called out: a noise like “Girrick”, and then more, similar noises. Something else answered it in a like tongue. The Girrick lizards were waiting for us to go so they could dine on the Mazen. We saw none of them, though, nor did the Mazen return.
We had more adventures, which I will not recount here. We found many interesting and valuable artefacts, and Giulia was able to extend her maps a little. We never did find that mythical medical installation, though. Either the Seeker was mad or we misunderstood his instructions. Perhaps it still waits to be found, with all the secrets of life and death interred within it.
31
Faith
You might think that I was set up nicely in Underworld. I had a place to sleep and was not going hungry. I had allied myself to someone who inspired fear and respect. I had some friends, and was not imprisoned or in great physical danger. Of course given that the Island is looming large in my personal history it should be obvious that none of it lasted.
It began when I did my stint as priest of the Temple. For a long time Greygori had ignored the Underworld maxim that all factions should put forward a candidate for the priesthood. While it was just him and Arves he conveniently forgot about it, and nobody was brave enough to force the point home. Some time after taking me on, he suddenly told me that I would be taking up residence in the Temple for a while. It makes me wonder whether he planned it, or at least had some prescience regarding it.
I was by no means loath to play priest. It was a nicely cushy position of authority where I would be able to play with the Temple machine to my heart’s content. The war between the Packers and the Brethren had been brought down by a trade agreement mediated by my predecessor, and everyone was too busy picking up the pieces to make trouble. It was a nice, quiet time for the Temple, and I started each day before the machine and the light-entombed figure of the Coming Man with an easy mind. I felt that religious office agreed with me very well.
Except…
One morning, when I ambled down to the Temple from Greygori’s chambers, things were different. In the centre of that rough, artificial floor, beneath the mobile starfield and the crackling flux of energy, was a woman.
She was hunched up about herself, forehead touching her knees, arms wrapped about her calves, muscles locked tight enough that you could not have uncurled her with a crowbar. I could make out little of her beyond that, save that she was of slim build, bright-haired and quite naked. And that she was something strange, something special.
The Caretaker was squatting beside her, giving a fair impression, for a metal spider-shaped thing, of bemusement.
I approached cautiously. A naked woman could be dangerous after all, especially if she were mad, which seemed likely given the circumstances.
She remained locked into her closed-up position like a catatonic. The Caretaker took a few careful steps back, as though it had been guarding her but trusted me to take over.
She looked straight into my face with wide eyes, and gasped out, “Where am I?”
I fell back from her. Granted, I had said the same when I awoke in the Temple, but this was different. Mine was a simple request for information. Her demand was the cry of the lost, the voice of someone adrift on unknown seas.
I reached out to touch her arm almost unconsciously. Her reflexive lunge away from me sent one of her feet hard into my chest and, as I sat down solidly, she tried to make her escape. She bolted straight away from me, came up against the curving wall of the Temple, skittered left and then right, trying to find an exit that was not there. The only way out was past me and she would not bring herself an inch closer to me than she had to. I was concentrating on breathing after the kick, whilst she flung herself at the walls like a trapped animal. When I finally looked straight at her, she had frozen again, back to the cold wall, staring at me with an intense fear out of all proportion to anything I could ever do to her.
She took my breath away. I was stunned by the sight of her. My mind went completely blank. It was not the nakedness. My life was not so empty of nakedness as all that, and there were three factions at least that ran men and women of purchasable virtue. It was just that she was perfect.
I do not mean that the way you think. No individual feature was unsurpassed. I had seen a more delicate nose, a more arresting pair of eyes, finer hair, curves of the body that… well. That was not it. Besides, tastes vary and one’s idea of perfection is not another’s.
It was the whole, the gestalt. When all those features of humble provenance were united in her, the result was unexpectedly and inexplicably perfect. All who saw her said just that. My heart leapt when I first set eyes on her and has never quite come down.
And I say ‘she.’ I saw her as ‘she’, that day, and I should know; I saw all of her there was to see. Except I do not know if what I saw was truly what was there. I knew others who referred to Faith as male, and there were days when I awoke a certain way, and he seemed male to me too. Faith was an image in that mirror we all keep within our minds to admire ourselves in, a fancy to picture hung on our arm. So she was ‘she’ to me, most of the time, but in committing myself, I merely betray my own leanings.
