Grosst hobbled up last and leaned against her cane to catch her breath. It was made of lacquered wood, carved smooth, with a brass knob on the end in the form of a strange machine that she’d earlier said the ancients had used to move large quantities of dirt and rock, and she rubbed the top so vigorously it looked like she was trying to mold the metal.
“Are you sure about this? Won’t this path lead us away from the river?” Grosst gestured with the cane. “I think we want to go that way.”
“There’s a monster thataway,” Kessie said.
“You mean like a witherer or a lemure?” Thiego said. “Because I have an underworld bracelet that will get us past them.”
“It has six arms and no head—no face of any kind—and a single eye right here.” Kessie pointed to her chest. “Right under where its neck would be if it had one. It lives in a metal can buried in the ground—not always buried in the same place. When you go past, it reaches out an arm and drags you in to eat.”
Grosst grunted. “How does it eat you if it doesn’t have a face?”
“It pulls you up to its belly and you pass through.” The girl’s face contorted as if she were reliving an unpleasant memory.
Grosst threw back her Basdeenian-style cloak to reveal a pair of pistols on her hips. “If I see that blasted thing, I’m going to put a couple of balls through its . . . well, whatever part looks vulnerable.”
“I wouldn’t count on finding a vulnerability,” Thiego said with a shake of the head. “Not if this thing is what I think it is.”
Kessie pointed south. “We should go that way first. There are some strange things there, too, but maybe not so dangerous.”
Thiego looked dismayed. “Lord Carbón, you’ve been down here before. You decide.”
“Five of us against six giant arms. I’d just as soon follow the girl’s advice.”
They followed Kessie south through the forest, thinking to cut over to the river when she deemed it safe to do so, and from there follow the bank upstream to where the artifact from the mines had taken up residence. As they walked, they occasionally reached lifeless clearings. First, the trees would vanish, replaced by sickly looking scrub, and eventually nothing whatsoever would grow.
Thiego removed one of the artifacts he’d been showing them earlier, what he called a particle counter. It was glossy and smooth in his palm, and made a series of clicks and whistles that he claimed were measuring the heat of the fire that had burned through here generations earlier and apparently left a residue that could not be immediately felt, but that could kill them all the same. To support this claim, there were occasionally dead birds on the burned-over stretches, where the creatures had apparently been stricken from the sky.
There were other dangers, too. Carbón spotted a cluster of mine shafts loosely covered with brush. One misstep and you’d fall to your death. The urchin girl had a good eye, and found a way through. On another occasion, Kessie hissed a warning at Grosst, who was prodding her way forward with her walking stick, and had nearly poked what turned out to be one of the purple-and-white snake creatures that Carbón had spotted as a boy. It crawled away on its thousands of tiny legs while the others stared, mouths hanging open.
Once, when going through a seemingly healthy stretch of forest, Iliana warned Carbón as he was about to step through a small gap in the vegetation, no more than a dozen feet across. A hole opened in the middle of the clearing, encircled by what looked like a ring of steel. Several pairs of glowing eyes gleamed up at them, and there was a sound that resembled pruning shears snipping open and shut.
Grosst cursed. Thiego grabbed the engineer’s arm as she started to move to one side.
“You’ll want to backtrack.” He consulted the clicking device in his hand. “The air is poisonous in that direction.”
One of the many devices the cabalist carried was a smooth metallic disk on a chain around his neck, an amulet of some kind. He lifted it periodically and turned it this way and that, while it turned gray or black or white and shiny. White and shiny was good, Carbón decided. Black made Thiego draw in air through his nostrils and blow it out through his mouth with a worried sound deep in his throat. Most of the time, it was gray.
“More poison from the lead fires?” Carbón asked.
Thiego shook his head. “Witherers. They’re lurking underground, sometimes right beneath our feet. We’d better go this way.”
“That will take us back toward the monster with no face,” Kessie said. The girl’s voice was high and tight. She pointed at an angle. “I always go this way. There’s dead land, but it’s not so bad.”
“Isn’t it?” Thiego asked. His voice was gentle. “Your hair is falling out, child.”
“What does that mean?” Iliana asked as Kessie reached a hand to her scalp, where the hair seemed quite thin, now that Carbón looked more carefully.
“My father warned me of that, too,” Carbón said. “He said the dead lands could cause all manner of illness and death.”
Thiego nodded. “That’s what the holy books say. Blindness, tumors, hair falling out. Vomiting.” He took Kessie by the arm. “You have to be more careful, child.”
The girl looked alarmed. “Nobody ever told me.”
“Really?” Carbón said, his tone sharper than he meant it. “It’s right in the code—no one outside the Luminoso can enter the Rift. That law is there to protect you.”
“But you came down!” she insisted. “You said it yourself.”
“I know, and I almost died. We saw witherers in the old mines. A trap of some kind went off and spewed a gas that made me think there were worms infesting my skin. I tried to tear off my own flesh, and would have, if my father hadn’t stopped me.”
“This is like something out of a nightmare,” Grosst said. “Any way you go, there’s death of one kind or another. Or madness.”
“You insisted on coming down,” Carbón pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure I warned you that it was dangerous.”
“I thought it was all superstitious nonsense.” She twisted her cane so hard that it looked for a moment that she’d snap it in two. “We don’t believe in all this magic and religion in Basdeen. Only what our hands can make and our eyes can observe. You can make a machine that will kill someone, but you can’t call up a creature from the underworld.”
Iliana scoffed. “You think witherers don’t exist? I’ve seen them with my own eyes.”
“I think something exists. I don’t think it’s a malevolent spirit.” Grosst frowned. “Or that’s what I always believed. After seeing that snake, I’m not so sure.”
“Every strange creature you’ve heard of exists down here,” Carbón assured her.
“Magic, superstition, science,” Thiego said. “They’re not so different as you might think.”
The cabalist picked his way forward, turning the amulet this way and that, and led them between two trees that had grown so close to each other that their branches entwined overhead. “Call them spirits of the dead or ancient machinery—it’s all the same thing. The Elders had their own name for what we’re seeing—tertiary guardian effects.”
“Guarding against what?” Carbón asked.
“Against us, frankly,” the cabalist said. “People who are in over their heads—way over their heads—and who the Elders saw as little better than looters. Barbarians, wreckers of society.”
Carbón had doubts about these so-called guardian effects. The plans of the Elders had clearly fallen apart, if what Iliana and Thiego had worked out was true, that the Quinta and the Luminoso had both been designed with the same purpose in mind. And it was clear that the witherers and their kind were doing a poor job protecting artifacts from the fallen generations, managing to kill innocents at the same time.
Maybe there had been some master artifact meant to keep them in line until the waking of the artifact in the coal mines indicated the rise of the Fourth Plenty. But whatever it was no longer worked as intended.
The five of them came out
of the woods and crested a grassy hill beside the river. They stopped for a moment to catch their breath and look behind them at the woods, which in its gloomy, closed state looked like a crypt from which they had somehow managed to escape.
The cliff walls were visible for the first time since they’d descended into the canopy. They loomed on either side of the river valley, with the Great Span a thin ribbon stretching hundreds of feet above them. The sun was almost directly overhead, and it was suddenly warm enough that they were loosening the buttons of their shirts and rolling up sleeves. The sun and clean air and open space left Carbón feeling safe for the first time since starting down the cliff. That security was probably an illusion.
Closer at hand, the river was low in its channel—the rainy season not yet being upon them—but it still ran swiftly. An ancient stone wall partially contained the opposite bank where it hadn’t fallen into ruins. Here and there along the riverbank sat the foundations of buildings, along with evidence of rusted machinery.
“Doesn’t look like Third Plenty work to me,” Grosst said. “Someone must have been living down here after the collapse.”
“Nobody can live down here,” Kessie said, her tone firm. “The monsters would kill you.”
“Not to mention the poisoned ground, if you don’t know how to avoid it,” Thiego said. He was still turning his amulet while consulting the particle counter in his hand.
“I don’t know who or when,” Grosst said, “but you can tell it wasn’t done by the Elders. Look, those stones were dressed by hand. The Elders used machines to cut their stone, or poured concrete into molds. Like what we’re doing up top with the bridge support, only with forgotten mixtures and formulas.”
Thiego looked unconvinced. “All I know is that nobody could have lived down here once the Elders threw up all these defenses.”
They moved south along the riverbank while Grosst and Thiego continued to argue about whether the ruins had been built by the Elders or someone else. Carbón was coming down on the side of the Basdeenian engineer. The collapse hadn’t come all at once, or else how could the Elders have made all of their preparations?
They must have seen it coming. They had exhausted the land—crops, minerals, forests—and that must have led to a gradual crisis. Later, war, famine, and pestilence. Cities on the coast collapsed, and the interior was conquered by wandering tribes. The Dianans, it was said, had come from the wastelands at the heart of the continent, plundering and enslaving, and then settling in turn. If that sort of thing happened in multiple places, the Quintanans could have had time to prepare.
So maybe there was a time when people continued to live in the Rift, still worked the exhausted coal seams at the bottom, still traded with the people up top. Growing fruits and vegetables down here and using the power of the water—some of the foundations looked like millraces to Carbón’s untrained eye—to maintain a connection with the previous generations.
And then what had happened? Some failure in the artifacts created by the Elders had unleashed protective spirits, which found their way into the Rift and destroyed whoever was down here. Tertiary guardian effects. Why tertiary? Was there a primary and a secondary?
They came around the bend and caught a glimpse of the artifact, and all his speculation vanished. Those who’d seen the object burn free from the mine and fall into the Rift had described a large, roughly ovaloid shape spewing green and orange fire. Some claimed it sprouted wings or fins, others that it had nozzles to fire its flaming jets and glowing eyes to see where it was going.
But all agreed on its rough shape.
So how was it that he was now looking at two cone-shaped chimneys about eighty feet tall that sent columns of steam into the sky, together with gleaming new buildings sprouting from the ground near the river, and something that looked like a tower made of metal bars, with an open bowl on top that was pointed at the heavens? The artifact must have built all of this, somehow.
Thiego took a deep breath and consulted his devices. “The path seems clear going forward.”
“Seems clear?” Iliana asked.
He gave a half shrug. “The particle counter is quiet, and the underworld bracelet can’t find any witherers.”
“The monster with no face is nearby,” Kessie announced. Everyone turned to her. “Can you smell the flowers? That’s it, that’s the monster. It’s protecting the buildings.”
There was something in the air like lavender, now that Carbón was smelling for it. A little like lavender, but behind it a hint of something sharp and disagreeable. Could it be ammonia? It was definitely floral, but in a chemical sort of way.
Iliana protested. “I thought the monster was back that way.”
“Maybe there’s more than one, yeah?” Grosst said.
“There’s only one,” Kessie said. “But it travels underground, following your footsteps if they’re too loud. And then it comes out and drags you into a metal can.”
“I was expecting something like this,” Thiego said. “Some final obstacle. We’ll have to get past its perimeter.”
“Go right ahead,” Grosst said. “We’ll wait here until you’ve cleared the way of this . . . whatever it is. Monster with no face.”
“It’s not a monster,” Thiego said. “It’s a guardian effect.”
“You should like that,” Carbón told the Basdeenian. “Science, not magic.”
The woman only grunted.
“If I’m right, it will have certain triggers,” Thiego continued, “things that bring it out of its protective tunnel. One of those triggers is proximity.”
“How close are we talking?” Carbón asked.
“I’m expecting a guardian effect at one hundred yards,” Thiego said. “Would you say we’re at two hundred yards from the nearest buildings now?”
Grosst squinted. “More or less, yeah.”
The cabalist nodded. “So we’re close. Once it’s activated, everyone will be at risk, no matter where they are in the Rift. So it’s no use trying to run away, not if it has some way to travel swiftly underground.”
Thiego sounded nervous, but not panicked, and that soothed Carbón’s nerves. That specific detail about guardian effects indicated he’d been studying, and hopefully had a solid idea of what they were dealing with. Not like Salvatore, who’d awakened the object with only the vague idea of controlling it.
Thiego handed out bracelets made of a flexible gummy-like substance. “Underworld bracelets. I doubt they’ll help if the guardians are determined to kill us, but they might prevent an accidental misunderstanding. Mainly it’s going to depend on whether or not I understand the holy books. Which I don’t, not really, but I’ve learned a few incantations that should get us past where we were last time we tried.”
“Let me get this straight,” Iliana said. “You’re going to try to trick it?”
Thiego fiddled with his underworld bracelet. “Unless someone has a better idea.”
“Whatever gets us through,” Carbón said. “But what about the artifact itself? It’s a furnace, right? So mainly we need to know the fuel it uses and how to draw off the heat.”
“Hold up a second,” Grosst said. “We get past the monster with no face, and that’s it? Or do we face more attacks as we fumble around? You ask me, we’ve got to figure out how to lower its defenses permanently, or it will come back with witherers and the lot.”
“Hopefully not,” Thiego said. “Hopefully once we get past this creature, the artifact will stop attacking us. I have reason to suspect that may be the case.”
Grosst tapped the brass head of her cane with a fingernail. “Fine, so let’s assume we get through. All is wonderful, we can wander around to our heart’s content. In theory. Let’s talk about the heat this thing is generating.”
Thiego sighed. “This is the tricky part. It’s not your ordinary type of fire. The precursor artifacts to this one burned a kind of metal that produces two million times as much heat per pound as a lump of the hardest rock coal.”
/> “That’s what you call the hot lead fire, right?” Carbón asked. “How do you burn lead?”
“It’s a special kind of lead called uranium. I don’t know exactly what it is or where to mine it, but I don’t think you can just strike a match and set the corner of it on fire, and then run away before it burns you alive.” The cabalist shook his head. “In any event, those earlier furnaces are what the artifact thought we’d already mastered. This device is something else, something even more advanced. It came down here to wait until we’d figured it out. How could we possibly do that if we don’t have a grasp on the uranium fires yet?”
“So we trick the monster with no face and get inside its perimeter,” Carbón said. “What good does that do if we don’t know how to operate the furnace?”
“I don’t know yet, but look at all the steam. It’s already burning something, and boiling off river water with the heat. We might be able to take the heat and use it until we learn more.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Grosst said. “With enough power, we could change everything.”
Sure, if you could somehow harness it. But how were they going to manage that? Carbón was mainly hoping that they’d get out of there without ending up a smudge of ash, like the fate that had befallen Salvatore.
As if reading his thoughts, Thiego removed several shiny objects from his satchel and passed them out, one for each of them. Carbón wondered what Naila would think if she knew that her Master of Secrets had distributed not one, but two artifacts to the uninitiated.
“These are thermal shields,” the cabalist said. “If it looks like the artifact is going to scorch us, throw yourself to the ground and pull this over the top of you.”
Carbón took his doubtfully. The thing was roughly the size of a handkerchief, and roughly the same weight, too. But as he peeled back one corner, he saw that it looked like a thinly hammered metal, although it didn’t feel metallic to the touch. The object seemed to be about the size of a blanket, if unfolded all the way. He tucked it into his belt.
Chasm of Fire Page 13
