by Dan Abnett
He fancied the blackness was a mountain beyond the snow, a mountain that was too big to be a mountain, a black tooth of rock that loomed out of the blizzard, broader and taller than could be taken in at a single glance. It was so big that it had already filled his field of vision, up and down and side to side, before he even realised it was there. At first, he thought it was the blackness of the polar sky, but no, it was a solid wall of rock, rushing towards him.
He sighed, reassured, able at last to comfort himself by definitively separating one memory-fact from dream-fiction. The mountain, that was definitely a dream.
No mountain could be that big.
He was carried in out of the storm, down into the warm and muffled blackness of a deep cave. He lay there and dreamed some more.
The Upplander dreamed for a long time.
The dreams started out as pain-dreams, sharpened by the pangs of his injuries, distorted by opiates flooding into his bloodstream. They were fragments, sharp and imperfect, like segments of a puzzle, or pieces of a broken mirror, interspersed with deadened periods of unconsciousness. They reminded him of the moves of a regicide game, a match between two experienced players. Slow, considered moves, strategically deep, separated by long stretches of contemplative inaction. The regicide board was old and inlaid with ivory. He could smell the lint that had collected in the corners of the board’s case. Nearby, there was a small toy horse, made of wood. He was drinking radapple juice. Someone was playing the clavier.
The sharp edges of his mental fragments dulled, and the dreams became longer and more complex. He began to dream his way through epic cycles of dreams. They lasted years, they enumerated generations, they saw the ice encroach and thaw away again, the ocean harden and return to motion, the sun rush across the cloud-barred sky like a disc of beaten copper, winking, glittering, growing bright like a nova and then dull like a dead stellar ember. Day, night, day, night…
Inside the dreams, men came to him and sat by him in the secret gloom of the cave. They talked. A fire was burning. He could smell the copal resin smoking into the air. He could not see the men, but he could see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire. They were not human. The shadow shapes had animal heads, or antlers, or horns sometimes. Man-shapes sat and panted through dog-snouts. Spiked branches of horn-crest nodded as others spoke. Some were hunched with the weighty shoulder hump of winter-fat cattle. After a while, he became uncertain if he was seeing shadows on the cave wall, or ancient parietal art, smudged lines of ochre and charcoal, that had been lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.
He tried to listen to what was being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, but he couldn’t concentrate. He thought that if he was able to focus, he would hear all the secrets of the world come tumbling out in a murmured river, and learn every story from the very first to the very last.
Sometimes the Upplander’s dreams picked him up and carried him outside the cave. They took him up to some high vantage where there were only stars overhead, in a roof of velvet blue, and sunlit lands below, a tapestry of worlds, all sewn together, all the worlds in creation, like the inlaid board of a great game. And on that board, epic histories played out for him. Nations and empires, creeds and races, rising and falling, bonding and fighting, forming alliances, making war. He witnessed unifications, annihilations, reformations, annexations, invasions, expansions, enlightenments. He saw it all from his lofty vantage, a seat so high and precarious that sometimes he had to cling on to the throne’s golden arms for fear of falling.
Sometimes his dreams swept him back inside himself, into his own flesh, into his own blood, and there, at a microscopic level, he observed the universe of his own body as it disassembled atom from atom, his essence sampled down to the smallest genetic packet, like light sifted and split into its component colours by a subtle lens. He felt he was being dismantled, working part from working part, like an old timepiece, and every last piece of the damaskeened movement laid out for repair. He felt like a biological sample: a laboratory animal, belly slit and pegged open, its organs removed one by one like the gears of a pocket watch; like an insect, pinned and minutely sectioned for a glass slide to learn what made it tick.
When his dreams took him back to the cave, where the therianthrope shadows sat muttering in the fire-light, he often felt as if he had been put back together in an altogether different order. If he was an old timepiece, then his dismantled movement had been rearranged, and some parts cleaned or modified, or replaced, and then his mainspring and his escapement, his going train and his balance wheel, and all his tiny levers and pins had been put back together in some inventive new sequence, and his cover screwed shut so that no one could see how he had been re-engineered.
And when he was back in the cave, he thought about the cave itself. Warm, secure, deep in the black rock, out of the storm. But had he been taken back there for his own protection? Or had he been taken back there for safekeeping until the man-shapes around the fire got hungry?
The strangest and most infrequent dreams of all were of the coldest, deepest part of the cave, where a voice spoke to him.
In this place, there was only blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smelled sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacked any water to form ice. It was far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. The Upplander’s limbs felt leaden there, as though he had swallowed ice, as though cold liquid metal ran in his veins and weighed him down. Even his thoughts were slow and viscous.
He fought against the arctic slowness, afraid to let it pull him down into dreamless sleep and death. The best he could muster felt like a feeble twitch of his heavy limbs.
‘Be still!’
That was the first thing the voice said to him. It was so sudden and unexpected, he froze.
‘Be still!’ the voice repeated. It was a deep, hollow voice, a whisper that carried the force of thunder. It wasn’t particularly human. It sounded as if it had been fashioned out of the bleating, droning notes of an old signal horn. Each syllable and vowel sound was simply the same low, reverberative noise sampled and tonally adjusted.
‘Be still. Stop your twitching and your wriggling.’
‘Where am I?’ the Upplander asked.
‘In the dark,’ the voice replied. It sounded further away, a ram’s horn braying on a lonely cliff.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
There was a silence. Then the voice came again, directly behind the Upplander’s right ear, as if the speaker had circled him.
‘You don’t have to understand the dark. That’s the thing about the dark, it doesn’t need to be understood. It’s just the dark. It is what it is.’
‘But what am I doing here?’ he asked.
When the voice answered, it had receded. It came as a rumble from somewhere ahead of him, like the sound of a wind moaning through empty caves. It said, ‘You’re here to be. You’re here to dream the dreams, that’s all. So just dream the dreams. They’ll help pass the time. Dream the dreams. Stop your twitching and your wriggling. It’s disturbing me.’
The Upplander hesitated. He didn’t like the threat of anger in the voice.
‘I don’t like it here,’ he ventured at length.
‘None of us like it here!’ the voice boomed, right in the Upplander’s left ear. He let out an involuntary squeak of terror. Not only was the voice loud and close and angry, but there was a wet leopard-growl in its thunder.
‘None of us like it here,’ the voice repeated, calmer now, circling him in the darkness. ‘None of us chose to be here. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed all the dreams they give us a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.’
There was a long pause.
‘The dark chooses us.’
‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.
‘I was called Cormek,’ the voice said. ‘Cormek Dod.’
‘How long have you been here, Cormek Dod?’
Pause, then a rumble. ‘I forget.’
‘How long have I been here?’
‘I don’t even know who you are,’ the voice replied. ‘Just be still, and shut up your racket, and stop disturbing me.’
Then the Upplander woke up, and he was still on the metal stretcher Bear had strapped him to.
The stretcher was swaying slightly, suspended. The Upplander’s vision swam into focus and he looked up, up at the chains rising from the four corners of the stretcher. They all met at a central ring, and became a single, thicker length of chain. The main chain, dark and oiled, extended up and away, into the oppressive twilight of the vast roof space above him. It felt like a cave, an enormous cave, but it wasn’t the dream-cave where the animal-men had murmured by the firelight, and it wasn’t the deep, cold cave with the blue glow either.
Everything was in shadow, in a twilight of a greenish cast. From what he could make out in the half-light, the cave was a vast space, like the nave of a cathedral, or the belly-hold of a voidship. And it wasn’t actually a cave, because the structural angles and edges were too straight and regular.
The Upplander couldn’t turn his head or move his limbs, but he was relieved to find that he was no longer in pain. There was not even a vestigial nag of discomfort from his torso or his shattered legs.
His relief was rather eclipsed by the anxiety he felt at his new situation: trapped and pinned, strapped down, unable to twist his head to see anything but the black roof space above. A dull, drowsy weight on his heart made him feel sluggish and leaden, as if he’d taken a tranquiliser or a sleeping draught. He blinked, wishing he could rub the grit out of his eyes, wishing the stretcher would stop swinging.
A swaying length of thick chain ran back down out of the darkness at an oblique angle to the central chain supporting him, and from its rhythmic jolts, it seemed clear that he was being hoisted up into the vaulted roof of the cathedral. The links clattered through an invisible block high above him.
He stopped ascending. The stretcher wobbled for a moment, and then swung hard to his left, out across the room, drawn with such force it started to rotate. Then the chain began to rattle back up in fits and starts, and the stretcher began to descend. The taut chains securing the four corners of the stretcher shuddered with every downward jerk.
He began to panic. He strained at the buckled canvas restraints. They wouldn’t give, and he didn’t want to tear or strain any of his wounds.
He came down lower, in a series of jolting drops, onto some sort of deck area or platform. Men moved in quickly from either side to take hold of the stretcher and steady it.
The Upplander looked up at their faces, and his anxiety transmuted into fear.
The men wore robes of simple, poor-quality cloth over tight body-suits of intricately fashioned brown leather. Each leather suit was constructed in artful panels, some shaped, some decorated with piercing or knotwork or furrowed lines, so that the whole resembled an anatomist’s diagram of human musculature: the wall of muscle around the ribs, the tendons of the arms, the sinews of the throat.
Their faces were animal skulls, masks fashioned from bone. Stub horns curled from discoloured skull brows. Branching antler tines rose from unicorn centre-burrs.
The eyes staring out of the mask slits at the Upplander were inhuman. They were the black-pinned yellow eyes of wolves. They shone with their own light.
Get off me! he shouted, but his voice was dust-dry in his throat, as though he hadn’t spoken for centuries. He coughed, panic rising in his chest. The bone faces crowded in around him, puzzled at his antics. All of them smiled the simpleton smile of skulls, the idiot grin of death’s face, but the eyes in the sockets and slits put the lie to that glee. The fire in the yellow eyes was predatory, a fierce intellect, an intent to do harm.
‘Get away from me!’ he cried, finding his voice at last, dragging it out, old and rusty, from the parched creek bed of his throat. ‘Get back!’
The skulls did nothing of the kind. They came closer. Hands sheathed in intricate brown leather gauntlets reached towards his face to clamp his mouth. Some of them had only two or three fingers. Some had dewclaws.
The Upplander began to thrash in his restraints, pulling and twisting in a frenzied effort born of panic. He no longer cared if he tore sutures, or reopened a healing gash, or jarred a mending bone fracture.
Something broke. He felt it snap, thought it was a rib or a hamstring, braced himself for the searing pain.
It was the canvas cuff on his right arm. He’d torn it clean off the metal boss that anchored it to the stretcher’s frame.
He lashed out with his freed arm and felt his knuckles connect with the hard ridges of a skull mask. Something let out a guttural bark of distress. The Upplander punched again, yelling, then he scrabbled at the buckles girthed around his throat, and undid the neck straps. With his throat free, he could lift his shoulders off the hard bed of the stretcher, and raise his head clear of the leather brace that was preventing all lateral movement. He bent up, leaning over to unfasten the canvas cuff holding his left wrist. The right-hand strap was still buckled around his right forearm with a frayed tuft sprouting from its underside where he’d torn it off the steel boss.
The skulls came at him, grabbing him and trying to press him back down. Unbraced, the stretcher swung wildly. The Upplander fought them off. His legs were still strapped in. He punched and twisted, and cursed at them in Low Gothic, Turcic, Croat and Syblemic. They gibbered at him, in commotion, trying to pin him and restrain him.
The Upplander’s right leg came free. He bent it, and then lashed out a kick with as much force as he could muster. He caught one of the skulls full in the chest, and rejoiced to see the figure recoil with enough violence to tumble at least another two of its robed companions backwards.
Then his left leg tore free too. As his weight shifted suddenly, the stretcher tipped and he spilled off, falling into half a dozen of the skulls trying to keep him in place. His fists were flying. The Upplander had never been taught to fight, and he’d never had to, but terror and a frantic survival instinct impelled him, and there didn’t appear to be any huge mystery to it. You swung your fists. If your fists connected with things, you hurt them. The things jerked backwards. They uttered growls of pain or barks of breath. If you were lucky, they fell down. The Upplander milled his arms like a madman. He kicked out. He drove them back. He kicked one of them so hard that it sprawled and broke its skull mask against the smooth granite of the platform.
The Upplander found his feet. The skulls were circling him, but they had become wary. Some of them had been bruised by his slugging fists. He snarled at them, stamping his feet and gesticulating wildly with his fists, as though he was trying to scare off a flock of birds. The skulls drew back a little.
The Upplander took a second to get his bearings.
He was standing on a platform of dark granite, a shelf that had been cut, sharp and square-edged, from the rock around it. Behind him, the stretcher was swinging on its chains. To his left, a row of oblong granite blocks lined one side of the platform, permanent catafalques onto which stretchers like his own could be lowered and rested. Above him dangled four or five more chain pulleys of various gauges and sizes.
To his right, the platform overhung a gulf. It went straight down into darkness, and smelled of wet minerals and the centre of the world. The gulf was a shaft, rectangular in cross-section, and the sides of the shaft had been cut, like the platform, out of the living rock. The shaft dropped into the darkness below him in square-cut, oblong bites, like the layers of a cake, or the cubic levels of a monolithic quarry. They looked like they had been cut with sideways slices of a giant chisel.
All around him, the chamber rose in majesty, its cyclopean walls rock-hewn like the shaft, too regular and rectilinear to be a natural cave, too make-shift and imperfect to have been planned
in one piece. Monumental stonemasons and mining engineers had opened this cavity over a period of decades or centuries, excising one or two levels of oblong blocks at a time, increasing the space in rectilinear levels, quarrying each layer of stone away and leaving artificial lines of division and stratification in the gigantic walls. Each phase must have been a monstrous effort, from the sheer tonnage of rock alone. The square-cut bites showed how huge and unwieldy each removed block of stone must have been. The cubic mass of a mountain had been hollowed out of the heart of a bigger mountain.
The platform and the shaft top were lit by the frosty green twilight. Watermarks streaked the horizontally scored, stratified walls, leaving downstrokes of emerald minerals and algae stain. The Upplander could not see how far up the ceiling was, because it was lost in the cavity’s darkness.
He edged backwards, the skulls around him. He became conscious of the way that every sound they made became a deep bell-echo in the vast chamber. He tried to move to keep the catafalques between him and the skulls. They circled in between the biers, trying to outflank him. He noticed that, although they looked solid-hewn, the catafalques had metal plates set in their sides. The plates incorporated vent caps, indicator lights and recognisably Terran control pads. Stout, reinforced metal ducting sprouted like drainpipes from the plates and disappeared flush into the platform. There was tech in this primordially quarried chamber, a lot of tech, and it was largely concealed.
The skulls attempted to rush him. The Upplander darted backwards and reached the pendulating stretcher. He grabbed its metal frame and steered it at the skulls, ramming it at them. They jumped back out of its way, and he rammed it again to keep them at bay. He saw the buckled canvas cuffs anchored to the stretcher’s bed. He had assumed he’d simply pulled them all off their pins, like the right-hand cuff that was still fastened around his forearm. But both leg straps and the left-hand cuff had been ripped. The waxed canvas and leather trusses had torn open along their stitching. He’d as good as wrenched himself free of his bonds.
