This Broken World, page 27
“Druadaen,” Ahearn muttered as he strode toward a dark crevice near the entry, “you look like just the kind of strapping and well-educated lad who’d know how to put a lever to good use.”
“I am,” said Druadaen, following him.
“Then make use of this.” The swordsman produced two steelwood staffs from the notch in the stone.
Druadaen took one of the pry bars, studied the disk blocking the entry. There was no way to get behind it; the gap between the boulder and the cavern wall was too tight. “How do you plan to move it?”
“Why, by getting it to rock back and forth a bit.” Ahearn jabbed the end of his rod down into the point where the disk met the cavern floor.
“That could take a very long time,” Druadaen commented.
“Well, if it does, then it does. Or do you have a better idea, Dunarran?”
“Actually, I just might.”
* * *
Druadaen’s plan was progressing as he’d hoped. It meant fewer people on guard duty, but so far, that trade had proven quite valuable.
At the other end of the long chamber, the three full-grown urzhen watched the tunnel mouth. They were the fighters best suited for detecting and fighting adversaries in near-darkness, and while one stood guard, the other two worked to build a deadfall trap. It was poised immediately to the right side of the opening and was designed to be released by one tug on a rope. It was delicate work, and Umkhira proved to be the only one with enough manual dexterity to initially build, and then intermittently adjust, the most difficult part: the balanced rock lever that would unleash the stones above it. If the lever was too stable, the stones wouldn’t fall, but if it was too sensitive, it wouldn’t hold them in place. Elweyr stayed well back from the opening, ready to intervene when and if an enemy arrived.
At the back door, Ahearn and Druadaen pushed at the steelwood levers, sweating side by side. But instead of just trying to rock it so that it would build enough momentum to then roll it out of the narrow slot between the wall and the boulder, Druadaen had positioned Zhuklu’a on top of that boulder. Every time the old millstone rolled back toward the two straining humans, she dumped a rucksack full of dirt, grit and small rocks into the narrow space behind it. As a result, that space was filling up, and every time the millstone rolled back upon it, it crushed that ballast into a finer and denser pile: a pile that was starting to become a ramp. Each time the mill stone rolled back, it started its return roll earlier and with more force. They couldn’t push it as far anymore, but that didn’t matter; as the ramp grew, more momentum from each push was being retained.
S’ythreni, who was filling the rucksacks used by Zhuklu’a, handed the next load up to her and called around the boulder. “Is it starting to roll out of the doorway, yet?”
“Soon,” called Druadaen. “Four more loads, maybe five.”
“Damn if it isn’t working,” swore Ahearn cheerily. “I’ll never live this down, being tutored by a Dunarran who’s just barely left home.”
Druadaen cocked an eye at him and was in the middle of formulating a response when Umkhira spat out an explosive oath. He turned, and for a moment, couldn’t make full sense of what he saw.
Umkhira had backed swiftly into the chamber from her guard position at the mouth of the tunnel, swinging her axe high, as if she were trying to hit a bird. The other two urzhen—Kaakhag and Brother—tossed aside the last of the rocks they were adding to the deadfall trap, grabbing for their own weapons. Elweyr was simultaneously craning his neck for a better view and lifting the lantern’s hood.
Umkhira swung again, then suddenly she leaped backwards—so hard and far that she fell—narrowly avoiding a claw that seemed to grow out of the ceiling.
Druadaen yanked his sword out of its scabbard, ran toward the tunnel mouth, and heard Ahearn and the others following—just as the sudden flare of Elweyr’s lantern revealed what was actually transpiring.
Umkhira was scrambling to her feet, shouting a warning in her own dialect of urzhen, but Brother didn’t understand it in time to realize that the threat was not just already in the tunnel mouth: it was overhead.
Druadaen had a brief glimpse of four baleful eyes reflecting the lantern just before a sinuous creature leaped down upon Brother, twisting around as it descended from the ceiling. Its jaws made a sound that was part shearing, part crunching as the Rot howled in pain and terror. Kaakhag emitted the only sound Druadaen had ever heard him make—a shrill, despairing wheeze—and charged the monster, axe swinging.
But the blow never landed. One of the creature’s six limbs flashed out and hit Kaakhag’s calf, cutting a wide gash in it. The force of the blow sprawled the big urzh backwards.
Umkhira, once again on her feet and axe in hand, slashed at the beast even as its hide began to change color. No longer the black of the tunnels, it swiftly matched the gray of the lamplit rocks, the transition revealing its sinuous body: a mass of rhino-hide plates studded with color-shifting spines and spiky fur.
Despite its armor, the creature recoiled from Umkhira’s heavy blow and, still dragging the screaming Brother, pushed through the entry toward her…
…just as its fluid motion became a ragged series of hesitant jerks, as if each movement now required a great deal of deliberation and focus. As Druadaen raced past Elweyr, he saw the cause: the mantic’s hands were rigidly extended toward the creature. Druadaen charged to close with it—
And skidded to a halt. If Elweyr was right, if the mere interposition of his body disrupted the mantic’s thaumates…
Druadaen dropped his sword and stepped further away from Elweyr. He swung his bow off his back as Ahearn and S’ythreni ran past. He shook his head at their shouts of anger, surprise, bafflement. There wasn’t time to explain and he had to keep his concentration on one thing: stringing his bow faster than he ever had before.
Where the creature’s jaws held Brother, dark blood was welling up rapidly—a mortal wound. Umkhira brought her axe down again, clipped off the leg that was holding him. The creature yowl-trilled and pushed toward her as Kaakhag limped back on his now twice-wounded leg and hacked at the center of its long body.
Blue-green ichor fountained briefly. As it stopped, the middle and rear legs on that side scissored, catching Kaakhag between them before he could complete his second swing. Moving unevenly, it dragged him forward as it kept after Umkhira.
As Druadaen got the bowstring’s loop into the nock of the bow’s lower limb, Kaakhag reached back to grab something, anything, to resist the pull of the monster—and his hand closed around the deadfall trap’s trigger-line.
The rocks slid down with a roar, crushing him and that entire side of the creature. Its four eyes bulged in either pain or rage. It lashed out toward Umkhira but missed: she was swift and it was still moving erratically. An instant later, as Ahearn and S’ythreni charged in and started slashing at it from the other side, Druadaen finished the step-through stringing of his bow, brought it up to meet the arrow he had pulled from over his shoulder, drew, and yelled, “Arrow!”
The swordsman and the aeosti jumped out of the way just as the fletching reached Druadaen’s ear—and he heard and felt a sharp snick! in the grip. The bow shattered loudly.
Whether or not Ahearn and S’ythreni realized what had happened, they leaped back in to press their attack. Having seen the hornlike plates turn the blow of axes, they aimed at the junctures with the points of their weapons.
It might have been an impossibly hazardous strategy, getting in and staying so close, had Elweyr not continued to exert his restrictions upon the creature’s movement and the rear half of its left side not been crushed and still partially pinned by the rockslide. After a few tries, S’ythreni’s weapons found a gap. More of the ichor leaked out. Ahearn watched for the source, and reversing his grip for a thrust, drove his bastard sword in with both hands. Sickly teal-green blood jetted out and the creature collapsed. The wound continued to gush for several more seconds before the flow began to abate.
S’ythreni stared at the litter of bodies and shouted at Kaakhag’s corpse. “I thought you said these things were small! Like the rats they kill!”
Zhuklu’a had scampered down off the boulder. “Most all of them are,” she said quietly.
“Well…this one wasn’t!” S’ythreni sounded like she was about to sob.
“It is from the Black, maybe deeper,” Zhuklu’a explained. “Like fish, few of those spawned survive, but the ones that do keep growing as long as they live…and they live a very long time. The oldest go to the deep Black to find large enough prey. They change there: harder armor, bigger claws, sharper teeth.”
“Does it matter?” Ahearn sighed grimly, looking back at the stone disk with which they had been struggling. “And we were almost out, too.” He spat at the collapsed creature. “Another bit of buggering from the universe, to remind us just how easily we can be bumped out of it.”
Elweyr checked to see if Umkhira had been injured, approached the bloody heap of bodies and stones. “The two of us will salvage what we can. The rest of you should finish rolling the stone out of the way. Let’s get out of this miserable place.”
PART FOUR
Conundrum:
The Giants
Journal Entry 161
8th of Blossom, 1798 S.C.
Tlulanxu
It has taken me some time to adapt to the strangest sensations I have experienced in many, many weeks:
Solitude and calm.
I didn’t have a single second alone while in the Under of Gur Grehar. And while silence was not hard to come by in those tunnels, it was in no way calming. It varied between the stillness of the tomb and the protective stifling of all noise, during which imagination filled the surrounding dark with soundless pursuers.
Here, writing in the service hostel maintained for Legiors and Outriders between postings, there is peace in the silence of night. And if I listen very closely, I can hear the tread of the watch, the laughter of distant revelers, the sleepy bellow of a titandray in its paddock. Sounds of a city with no worries beyond those of the next day’s round of labor and living. Dunarra may be located upon the same globe as the Under, but they are truly different worlds. And although I welcome and revel in the comforts of Tlulanxu, I no longer feel fully at home in it. If I ever did.
My recent fellow travelers are, to the best of my knowledge, in Menara again. Our journey back was longer than the one north to Gur Grehar. First, we returned Zhuklu’a to her tribe (which would have naught to do with any of the rest of us). A week later, we bivouacked a few days while Umkhira rode to her own kin (who were no more forthcoming with an invitation). After that, we crossed the open lands that separate those wilder western reaches from the border of Connæar, which we paralleled. Our prudent intent—to lessen our chance of encountering troublesome creatures while also remaining as distant as possible from Khassant—was rewarded when we finally drew within sight of the Sea of Kudak and so, parted company.
I did not expect to be missing them, and yet, I do. And not merely in the way of those who have served together under largely benign conditions. It is because we shared living in constant peril, in the midst of enemies, with no hope of help except that which resided in each other.
Before parting, they promised to seek me here, particularly since I had the authority (barely) to give them a writ requesting passage aboard one of the Consentium’s routine advice packets that cycles between Tlulanxu and Menara. However, they have much to distract them in the free city, most especially the search for Elweyr’s parents. That search is apparently what brought S’ythreni into contact with him and Ahearn, but they did not share any further details with me. Frankly, I suspect that even Ahearn is not in full possession of them. But as he philosophically put it, “One never deals with aeostu without also dealing with their mysteries.”
I have my doubts they will avail themselves of the two-day sail from Menara to Tlulanxu, particularly since I felt obligated to emphasize how unlikely it was that we would share further travels. I am still an Outrider, and I am due for new orders, although those are late in arriving, actually. It is a welcome irregularity, but also perplexing.
However, it has afforded me the opportunity to spend time at the Archive and with Shaananca once again as I finish writing my observations of the Under in general and the urzhen in particular. Naturally, for those notes to be useful to subsequent researchers, I took pains to ensure that they built upon the older sources that I had studied (well, skimmed) before my travels.
Alas, that noble intent was stymied. But not by prior differences of opinion or theory or observation: I expected those discrepancies. Rather, the source of my frustration was—and remains—the disregard that researchers and archivists and scholars in general evince for each other’s work.
Specifically, I spent my first days back in the Archive Recondite attempting to puzzle out the proper naming scheme for the many beings that earlier texts refer to under the broad label “the Bent.” At the end, I realized I could not discover the authoritative and orderly taxonomy of them…because it doesn’t exist. They did not merely ignore each other’s researches but seemed to subtly relish invalidating it, however they could.
In the end, never have I been so grateful, and secretly proud, to have had the instinct (if not the foresight) to deflect all suggestions to consider a career as an archivist or docent. It seems entirely possible that even I could have become pedantic and hopelessly abstruse…
However, although my notes do expand what has been recorded regarding the Under, I am no closer to answering how, or from whence, the deepest dwelling Bent get the food with which to support their immense communities. Nor how it could be that Bent who are said to emerge from the Root of the World happen to speak the same language, worship the same gods, and share the same culture as those who were raised in a tribe. A logical surmise is that they are outcasts from still deeper communities, but if so, I am wholly ignorant of how far down the Underblack goes or how many layers it has. In short, are there always still deeper communities ready to arise just as the hordeing approaches? And wouldn’t each layer find it just that much harder to acquire minimal sustenance?
I cannot rule out the commonplace explanation for all of these quandaries: that it is all at the will of the gods. But would the gods regularly rebuild an entire species by the flagrant use of miracles? That seems to press far beyond the implicit limits they themselves have set upon the projection of their will into the world. Sacrists and nativists agree on few matters, but one such is that both peace among the gods and balance in the world depend upon their universal accord to limit the physical exercise of their power. Orthologues report how the deities promised each other to restrict mundane manifestations to finite and particular acts. Otherwise, even the passing of seasons and the spinning of the globe would be their playthings. Whether altered with serious intent or on a whim, the outcome is identical: natural law would not merely be provisional, it would be moot.
Turning away from my failure to make any definitive determinations regarding the Bent and the urzhen, I have shifted my attention to a new mystery that has increasingly pressed at me since Elweyr asserted that blugners, also known as ur gurur, cannot be one and the same as the race commonly called “giants.”
It began as a fairly casual curiosity, but my very first researches indicate that Elweyr is almost certainly right. Blugner are not merely considerably smaller, but are always noted as being misshapen, often with pronounced asymmetries of both head and body. They are comparatively slow, lacking agility, and have markedly less manual dexterity than any other biped. Their reproduction is extremely different from urzhen and the preeminence of Sister Sows in their groups suggests that females are at least as socially powerful as males, probably more so.
Giants are entirely different. They always dwell above ground, usually in large caves in the sides of hills or cliffs, and if not, then in deep forests. They purportedly prefer hostile climates and regions and are said to surround themselves with Bent and other servitors who routinely patrol their domains in exchange for the decisive power they bring to battlefields. Both reclusive and capricious, they remain quiescent for years and then suddenly fall upon communities, either in groups or alone, but always insatiably hungry. They stand twice as high as the tallest human, and whereas blugner are slow and cumbersome, giants recall humans in their speed and manual dexterity. However, they cannot simply be large humans, because if I were expanded to twice my height and five or six times my weight, I could not even stand, let alone function: it would be a physical impossibility.
During my years at the Archive, I spent considerable time assisting both physicians and scholars of fauna and flora with their researches. As a result, I learned a reasonable amount regarding certain basic principles of physiology. For instance, even with a heart the size of a bucket, a proportionally larger human would likely collapse due to inadequate circulation of blood. While there are many immense mammals, all evince multiple adaptations to meet the circulatory requirements imposed by both their size and weight.
Conversely, according to the archivists who specialize in great fauna, simply expanding a human form to fifteen feet in height does not provide the room nor proper shape to incorporate such adaptations. Likewise, they see no way that the blood may perfuse and then return quickly enough from the small capillaries that service the digits of distant extremities, particularly toes. Consequently, most scholars advanced one of only two answers: that giants are simply creatures of myth or that they enjoy the intervention of deity.
A further perplexity is that in the older texts, they are referred to as belonging to that group of creatures known by the label direkynde. It is a mysterious nomenclature that I might never have encountered were it not for the august and elderly Saqqaruan scholar who took an interest in me when I was an assistant at the Archive, now six years past. I have since learned that he is none other than Aji Kayo, the First Scholar of the Orchid Throne. Also, by a stroke of singular luck, he returned to Tlulanxu just a few weeks ago so that he might expand the research for his magnus opus, about which he is infamously close-lipped.
