Alium, page 31
“This headwear,” said Teperchael, “is, I think, at least one billion years old.”
Ogwold could not help but laugh. “But it is shinier than my friend’s sword!” Tinjus nodded in agreement, though his eyes were glossed over with rapture at the sheer sight of the artifact, and it seemed that its value to him differed greatly than for Teperchael.
“Ah, but watch.” Teperchael placed the helmet onto his head.
“And see, it fits you!” Ogwold leaned in. “Novare heads can’t have existed a billion years ago!” But he stopped speaking quickly, and his jaw fell, for the visor of the helmet had lit up with bright, neon blue light, such that Teperchael’s features were replaced with a field of alien energy.
“It’s magical, obviously,” said Tinjus. “Some knight’s gear enchanted by some old art.”
Teperchael removed the helmet and at once the queer electric light diminished from its face. “No, no, it’s not magical. It’s merely… advanced. Far more advanced than anything upon Altum today. My theory is that long ago there was a different civilization in this land, whose technology had far surpassed all else in the Cosmos. Something terrible must have happened, however; my personal hypothesis is that some celestial body crashed into the world and extinguished their entire species. Things like this,” he wiped the helmet again for good measure, gazing upon it fondly, “are the last remnants of their time.”
“That’s… fascinating,” murmured Ogwold.
“It’s a nice idea,” said Tinjus wetly, “but apart from the extinction event, it’s only speculation, and even that theory rides on a sparse fossil record and a layer of unknown minerals which he’s unjustly concluded are from beyond. How about we show you some fossils that you can really understand?” He smiled almost cruelly. “And don’t be a stranger. You ain’t nowhere near as queer as the folk came through here a season ago.”
“Oh yes,” Teperchael said with a burst of enthusiasm. “They were somethin’ else! Scary too. Six or seven of them I think, all in black robes, with different coloured hemming. Didn’t say a word, none of em, except for this real old fella. He was a riot! Told me all sorts of things about these caverns. He just loved poking around, though it made me nervous, I won’t lie. We’re awful protective of our dig, you see.” Again he pronounced the word ‘dig’ with strange majesty. “You best not be wandering off in the night. Go too deep into these caves and you might get right lost.”
“He found an old skull too, but let us keep it, the old fool,” said Tinjus wetly. “Ah, if only they had stayed. We could’ve dug so much deeper.”
“Oh, were they good at digging?” asked Ogwold.
Both men gave the ogre an exceedingly odd look, even Teperchael losing the warmth of his manner which had been so soothing the whole while, and Ogwold felt for a moment very alone.
“Did they take the high road?” Byron had appeared just inside the firelight, staring coldly at Teperchael.
“Oh! Uhm. Yes, they did. The high road, just above this cave, yes.”
“Were they Novare?” Byron scowled.
Tinjus coughed hideously before speaking. “Well. This old man, you see, his skin was purple. And his eyes were… different. He had two tails.”
“At least another one of them wasn’t too, you can be sure of that. They were covered head to toe, but one of them had her hood off. Her skin was purple, and she had short white hair like a man, but it was dark and I kept my distance.”
“The others wouldn’t come in,” murmured Tinjus, his rat’s eyes gleaming vacantly. It seemed that Teperchael glared at him, though it was hard to tell beneath the huge shadow of his hat-brim.
Byron nodded, turned and went to sit against the wall again.
“Strange one, isn’t he,” said Teperchael.
“Oh he means well,” said Ogwold grinning. “He’s just not a conversationalist really. Keeps to himself.”
“Right, well.” Teperchael gripped his brother’s shoulder tightly once again. Then he stood with the strange bright helmet under his arm, and his countenance was oddly distant. “It’s time we went to sleep.” He gestured at a pile of animal hides in the far corner of the cave. “Help yourself to those skins for bedding, and give some to your friend there. We’ve a little hideout underneath the boards where we sleep.”
Already Teperchael was making his way to the edge of a deep pit from which one tall table of scaffold rock rose, and clambered down a ladder out of sight. His eyes looked odd and dark for all his amiability as he descended, and it seemed many times that they darted over the strange black holes along the wall.
“Holler if you need us.” With a tip of his floppy hat Tinjus winked, looking conversely enthusiastic, and waddled off to join his brother.
Chapter XVIII
Hive of the Eyeless
Ogwold awoke in darkness. His head seared with pain, blind somnolence suffocated his senses, and his stomach was a ball of stone. The air was dank and stale, touched with the sounds of some dripping and oozing nameless fluid. Feeling around on the stone floor, his hand brushed against cloth, now solid flesh. He scooted over to the man lying in the black and shook him gently, but it did not take much.
The voice which arose from the dark was ragged and broken. “I hope you enjoyed those berries.”
“What happened?” said the ogre, kneading his pulsing skull.
The mercenary seemed to have sat up, in which position he coughed up some spattering of invisible fluid. “You passed out in a bad way.” He breathed slowly for a moment, hacked up another flow. “I failed us. There were too many.”
“Too many what?”
“No idea. Monsters. Hundreds of them everywhere. Came out of the tunnels, the entrance, every crack in the rock as soon as you were out. Those bastard delvers were nowhere to be seen.” Byron coughed, groaned. “They wanted us alive.”
Ogwold shivered, feeling an immense blackness all around them here in this tiny chamber. “Where is Videre?”
Byron winced. “We should have left as soon as we saw she wouldn’t enter the cave. She could have escaped easily, but when the danger was on us she stood by my side. She was still fighting when I joined you in unconsciousness.”
“Videre,” said Ogwold groggily, his shoulders falling forward in invisible shame, though the tone of his misery was clear enough. “I am sorry. There’s no excuse. I was hungry and well, it’s not only that; I just, I’ve never met any Novare that were actually interested in talking to me. I know it sounds silly, but my people are like animals to most men.”
The mercenary spat another torrent of fluid. “What about me?”
Ogwold was silent, as if to point out that Byron was only ever interested in fighting. The mercenary sighed. “Look. It’s fine. I should have forced us out of there. And…” The ogre could feel that green eye on him in the darkness. “Never mind. Let’s get out of this pit.”
Videre was indeed nowhere to be found. Their bags also seemed to be gone, and both of their swords. They were still clad, and Ogwold pulled his father’s cloak tightly around him to break the damp, subterranean air. In this motion of gathering together what few things were left, he found the sphere still in his possession. It was actually tightly held in his hand, and may have been for quite a long time. The invariable heat and drone brought certainty and safety to him in this blackness. He opened his hand, and a pale light bloomed around them in the cell, unflickering, pure and faultless as ever, emanating from the sphere changelessly. The little thing floated as a lone star in an uncompromising night, humming and spinning in place. Now they could see a little ways beyond the dirty cell bars, into a stiflingly low-ceilinged chamber where there were only oddly shaped formations of rock and—further on—more inky darkness.
The pale glow washed over Byron slumped against the dissimilar wall beside the bars, and Ogwold gasped, for the man was caked in blood. Deep cuts split his brow, tore through the lips horribly, oozing black bile, and from his open-hanging mouth beaded a constant stream of fluid. Tattered and lying open as was his black cloak, along the thin leather of his chest piece revealed was a single ragged and clotted slash running shoulder to hip which appeared to have only recently stopped bleeding. His posture was so contorted with unease as to appear nothing like the warrior from before if not for that one green eye, hardly opened, radiating a miasma of bruising—that emerald ray had still its composure and indefatigable intensity. It was that look, not of pain, but almost of awe that caused the ogre to turn and face the back wall of their cell.
There dangled insidiously an abominable thing in the half-light. It was a grotesque, veinated sack hanging pendulous from the ceiling, oozing foul phlegm onto the ground with soft spattering noises that they now realized were not coming from the deeps of the caves, but from right beside them. The disgusting fluid had even now slopped close to Ogwold’s seat such that he scrambled oafishly away and pressed his back against the cold bars. The sphere hovered over almost curiously, greeted by a muted gurgling; then there began a troubling swelling and twitching. The undulating surface suddenly ruptured, and a thin, pale limb extruded from the slime that poured forthwith, lunging and strafing, now gripping the membrane encasing the whole glob of the sac and peeling it away. An awful burbling gibbering came from within the mess, and a loathsome open maw made its egress, heaving in its first rattling, gasping breath. When it exhaled at last the cell was filled with the fetid stink of an open grave.
Groaning Byron rose into a crouch, blood sloshing down his trunk and smacking the floor, and he was forced to place his palms against that surface as he coughed up more fluid. Slowly he gathered himself, sucked in a long, savage breath, and rushed the hideous creature as it was born. He reached right into the tattered cocoon and grappled elbow deep with its evolving contents. The slippery limb seized violently, toothless mouth opened and closed breathlessly. Desperately a second head breached, hoarsely whispering from the miasma, and it too had a mouth which gulped up the dank air. Byron’s eye was a fierce green in the light as he attached his other hand to the new neck, and there he stood quaking, gritting his teeth, fresh blood seeping up from his wounds, spattering the stone as the maws strained for breath. Disgusting bile and sludge spilled endlessly against his chest and splashed over his quaking shoulders so that he was soaked in sick. At last the creatures ceased to live, and Byron flung their smothered throats back into the tattered albumen viscera.
“Well this is poor luck.” He turned, smiling in the ghostly light, one hand clutched over his now gushing chest wound. It was the second time Ogwold had seen the man smile, yet it was a different and not quite calming smile to have seen. Now in the belly of forsaken darkness an angry joy seemed to rage behind the mercenary’s complexion. The light in the eye of the training Byron was brought on by the sense of adventure, but now Ogwold saw that such was but a shadow of the true awesome love for combat that lived in this man. It was the inescapable danger of their situation that brightened his companion’s spirit. Perhaps there was truly nothing he craved more than a fight to the death.
But all at once the furious joy was gone. The man collapsed onto the slime-thick ground, and a pool of dark blood spread out around him. “Byron!” Ogwold moved to him as quickly as one so massive may in a place so cramped. He turned the mercenary over to free his face from the sick, and listened to his breathing. The sphere lowered its light, illuminating the horrible gash. As if by instinct Ogwold placed his greener hand over the wound, but seeing it there, feeling the flow of life leaving Byron so clearly, he recalled that the first identity of his new arm had been that of a miraculous healer. The first sensation he had felt in its presence was that of pain being drunk and the flow of blood being stemmed. He reached out to the fibres of the plant with his heart and mind and envisioned the blood slowly ceasing to run, pictured the wound closing up, imagined that he and the plant and the mercenary were for this time one growing and living entity. Even he dreamed out of panic and respect for the man that the plant left his own shoulder and became rather a gift to the mercenary.
As this thought transformed through his spirit into the plant and achieved synthesis with the flesh of Byron—or so he dreamed was the case—there entered his consciousness a new energy, not like the plant and certainly unlike his own. His visions of surging green fibres and deep-seeking roots converged and swelled into a great hill of rushing grass, and he saw upon its moonlit crest a vigilant, gaunt wolf made of smokeless fire. Haggard but tireless, infinitely wrathful yet completely devoted, it was a horrifying but awesome impression, as one might suffer standing before a flow of lava, so beautiful and captivating yet so inexorably destroying everything in its path. And yet for so powerful and exquisite a thing it was totally alone, one wolf, one flame, lost in one endless night. It howled, broken and tired, and no one but Ogwold could hear. So it was that he did not shy from this solemn predator he seemed now to have reached like some deep and brutally sheltered truth. Instead he only reached more fully, more compassionately out to hold and provide for it, to help it grow one day into a raging lupine flame. Whatever it was that this flow of fire, this undying hunter strove to kill, Ogwold felt in this moment that it was not in the name of evil.
“Can you bend those bars?” came the sudden voice of the mercenary.
The vision dissolved into ribbons of black and grey, now silvery light such as beat against his eyelids from the sphere. Now Ogwold dared open his eyes, and saw that the great plant had already begun to smoothly retreat and detach itself from the man. As this motion folded back upon itself into the form of a Nogofod hand, he saw that certain tendrils had sought out other injuries throughout the body and now returned from their own businesses there. At last he held his reformed hand up in the light whole and new, separated from Byron, who sat up partly in the light, stared at Ogwold, now the green hand, down at his wounds which had sealed and scarred over in such a brief period of time. Then he jerked his chin towards the cell door, seeming certainly well recovered as he said with renewed vigour, “I appreciate the hand. But there’ll be time for thanks once we’re out of here. The bars, ogre. Break them.”
“Byron.” Ogwold yet held his hand up as if he held yet in its green palm that brief connection with the remotest feelings of the mercenary, that last understanding of indomitable virtue in a storm of death, the wolf on the hill. Killing, he thought; was it really so unnatural? He looked back to the mutilated mess of flesh. “Those were babies.”
“Imagine what the adults are like,” Byron grunted severely, sitting up against the wall and folding his arms. He seemed quite well recovered. “Why do you think we were kept alive and locked up in a room with these monstrous eggs, eh?”
“But… they didn’t even have a chance.”
“This isn’t the time for chance.” The mercenary glowered in the silvery light, and the grin which he’d worn while throttling the gasping creatures returned.
Ogwold shuffled on his knees and firmly planted his massive hands around two of the argent bars. With the stink behind him it was easier to breathe, but it was not like the cavern air was any good either, and still the incessant gentle bursting and pooling of the dissolving pods continued. He pulled mightily, and there was even a deep-seated groaning in the metal; fine dust and dirt fell from the ceiling, but that was all. He paused and sought his greener limb, envisioning the trunk of a great and powerful tree which he had seen on their journey, casting out its imagined roots round the bars. Behind him Byron watched, grinning openly now as the ogre’s shoulder swelled and swallowed up the entirety of the cell door, hardening like a cast of cement, now constricting with unyielding pressure. There was a loud warping, twisting screech and the entire wall of metal splintered and dissolved in a storm of rust.
Byron stole past him into the dark tunnel on his long legs low and lithe like a predator in the night. Even before he willed it, Ogwold’s arm smoothly slunk hissing back to its original shape. He had not even pulled again at the bars; merely the thought of squeezing them did the work. It seemed that with each transformation he willed in the limb their congress became more easy and natural. He flexed the hand that was formed anew from the grasping, thick mess of vines and roots that had only moments before issued as from his bones. In the strength of its action he felt the echo, the scar of the smokeless wolf that was Byron now imprinted in the texture of this limb which was now a shield, guardian, guide, spirit—and weapon. Surely he must turn it upon the monsters if they were to escape. The pale light began to recede from the striations and pores of the alien flesh so uncannily his own, and quickly he lumbered after Byron whom the sphere followed more closely.
“Quiet,” grunted the mercenary, turning and grimacing.
Ogwold’s massive feet were a racket in the still subterranean air. Even beyond the cell he was forced to crouch incredibly low, and he began to feel that the walls would close around him and trap him forever. They took a bend, and looked into a low-ceilinged stone room. There was a sad, flat surface hewn from the rock in the centre, and their bags lay there, which they took, but no swords could be found. There was only one way out of the room, an even tighter passageway, and they went along this narrow hall in the light from the sphere.
They passed many other cells then, also barred, in ranks both vertical and horizontal like the pores of a honeycomb. Inside of them each there was in the deep shadowed corner one, sometimes two of the foul egg-sacs. Many such odious little pockets in the rock contained only the remains of these fleshy cocoons like the huge peels of some abominable fruit, and they saw that in these cases the doors were opened, and the creatures must have gone out, full up with their first meal. Ogwold shuddered to think that they might not have awoken when they did, or that he might have been alone and faced with the moral quandary which for Byron posed so simple and seemingly righteous a solution.
