by Tim Lebbon
Ramus took in a deep breath and stood. I did it. He grimaced against the pain in his knees and arms, closed his eyes when his head throbbed agonizingly several times. Not now, don't strike me down now, after I did that. He breathed deeply, started back toward the village, and the pain in his head faded to an ache.
He started running, his muscles finding strength from somewhere, and his compacted knees, creaking at every step, carried him as faithfully as ever.
As he entered the ruined village, one of the things came into view from behind a line of stark dead trees. Ramus shouted the words. It turned to flee, eyes going wide in shock, and he did not even stop to see it turn. As he dashed by he heard a sharp crack as something ruptured.
Ramus tried to ignore the effects of the steam breaths. He felt the movement beneath his feet again, heard the hissing of venting steam and tried to steer himself to the spot where the creatures had fallen upon them. He felt so dreadfully alone, and the power he had in those words removed him even further from the world. He barely knew himself anymore.
He saw one of the creatures before him, kneeling forward with blood dripping from its cleaved skull. Lulah's short knife was jammed into its throat. It was dead, but still he gave it a wide berth.
He thought of calling her name, but he did not know how many more were out there.
The Serian appeared from behind a low shrub. She must have been squatting, but she rose quickly to her full height, swinging the sword in an arc that would slice off the top of Ramus's skull.
He started to mutter those words. He could not help himself. They came from within him, yet he was theirs too, wielded by them instead of wielding them himself. As Lulah's eyes went wide and she let go of her sword, Ramus bit his tongue. Blood gushed into his mouth.
“Piss on me, Ramus, I almost took off your fucking head.”
He smiled a bloody smile, and Lulah smiled back. “And I nearly turned you to stone.”
Lulah dashed across to where she had dropped a knife, and only then did Ramus notice her left hand, mangled and flapping.
“What happened?”
She glanced down at her hand, then away again quickly. “Bastard bit me as I was cutting its throat.” Her hand was ruined. Three fingers were gone, and the rest of it was a distorted mess. “We have to sort that out,” Ramus said.
“Not yet. We go. Away from here, away from this pissing steam, and when we find somewhere—”
They both heard the hoots and clicks of the things closing in. There were too many voices to count, and Lulah's face fell. “Ramus, I don't think I—”
“Run,” he said. He nodded deeper into the valley. “That way. They're coming from both sides, so we leave. Don't stop running. You need to be far enough away so that you can't hear my voice.”
“Ramus—”
“It's our only hope!”
“No. You could go, I could stay and hold them off.”
“Achieving what?”
Lulah winced as her hand banged against her leg. “It's why I'm here.”
Ramus snorted. “Then you don't get paid. Run now, Lulah. No more time.” Already he could see the steam parting to his left as something came through, and behind him he heard the harsh footsteps of things running across the loose ground. Lulah ran, and Ramus turned around.
He had no idea what power he wielded, where it came from or what it was supposed to protect. But this was as basic as it came: kill, or die.
SO HE KILLED. He waited until the last moment, then spoke words that took a few beats to utter, listening to the sounds of pursuit change to screeches of surprise and pain. Things fell to the ground behind him, some of the impacts fleshy but most hard, and in the distance he heard the tone of their calling change as those nearby fell silent.
The mist no longer drifted; it boiled. Upset by the creatures running through its lazy streams, it swirled and danced, added to by several loud gushes from vents behind and to Ramus's left. Something came at him and he said those words again, louder this time, and hoped Lulah was far enough away to avoid their effect. The thing skidded past him and struck another changed creature, both of them tumbling to the ground and shattering. Stunned by what he had done he fell silent, almost forgetting that they were still coming at him.
The air sang with violence, the ground shook with its effects and, though blood did not flow, Ramus smelled the stink of battle. It was not a smell he liked. Yet deep down there was enjoyment; he wielded words of such power that they could change the physical in a way no one had ever dreamed.
Something pattered across his scalp and he held out his hand, catching several small flies whose fine wings were already crumbled away.
When at last he heard no more hooting or crackling, no more footsteps closing in and the steam around him rose relatively calmly once more, Ramus sighed and slumped to the ground. He felt exhausted, but elated. His muscles twitched with cramps and sang with the need to be flexed again.
He stood slowly and surveyed the gray carnage around him. Nothing moved save the mist. It was time to find Lulah.
AS HE LEFT the steam clouds behind and hurried through clear, cool air once more, he heard more of those things hooting and bellowing behind him. The noise was much louder than before, more urgent and filled with a sense of dread that turned him cold.
Let them come, he thought.
But when he passed through a clump of trees, emerged on the other side and saw what stood before him, he knew that they would not stop pursuing until he was dead.
Chapter 20
SHE TRIED TO think of Beko. If what Sordon Perlenni said was true, and the Sentinels had kept her alive because she was with child, then Beko was the father. So as Nomi huddled in the corner of her pit trying to ignore the various discomforts, she tried to remember the big Serian captain, his surprising smile, his love of free poetry, the scarred face that gave away his profession. But the only way she could think of him was dead. He grinned up at her through a rent in his skull, arms and legs angled out around him where he lay on a ledge halfway down the Great Divide. She shook her head and he was there again, broken across the lower slopes of the Divide. Animals picked at him, taking away the tastiest morsels to leave his bones to be picked clean by insects and ants. She still recognized his hair.
She tried for a long time keeping her eyes closed so that she did not have to see the Sentinels that passed across the timber grate ceiling of her cell. When she did look at them, they were animals. She could think of them in no other way. They may have built a great civilization up here, existed for unknown hundreds or thousands of years to guard or protect the Sleeping God, and they did have human features. But they grunted and stank, bickered and spat. They stared into space with vapid eyes, and whatever they saw excited nothing in them. Theirs was a history she would have once loved to discover and unearth. But not now. Now they were just another animal, ready to rip her unborn child from her womb and hang it from a tree.
She sobbed and leaned back against the cool ground. Beko fell, and he smiled as she fell with him. For now, that was the best she could do.
THEY GAVE HER more food, dropping it through the grille above her. She caught what she could, and what she missed she kicked into the far corner where the bloodied mess lay. The pit floor stank, and she would not risk eating something that had touched it. Some of what they brought smelled and tasted foul, but there was a small orange fruit that was both rich and meaty in its taste, and several of those filled her to satisfaction. They brought meat as well. Nomi was thankful that it was dead when they dropped it, but none of it was cooked, and she was unsure whether her stomach would accept such basic fare again. If she had been able to identify the flesh, she would perhaps have taken the risk, but it came in small, stringy slabs, heavily laced with fat and still displaying clumsy cutting marks where it had been skinned or shelled. Try as she might she could not cleanse the blood from her skin. If it stained her like this on the outside, she did not trust it to eat.
The water they ga
ve her tasted fresh, clear and clean. She sometimes used it to wash, and when they saw her doing that they would fetch more. The thought came briefly that she was an object of fascination rather than a prisoner, but then she remembered what they were going to do.
When none of the Sentinels watched from above, she touched her stomach. She felt nothing, sensed nothing, yet she was becoming fiercely protective of whatever might be inside her. She closed her eyes and saw Beko's smile as he fell, hoping that given time she would remember how it was to be alone with him.
SHE CRIED. SHE hated the weakness in that, but she felt so painfully alone and forgotten that she could not hold back the tears. They were not only tears of self-pity. She cried also for the friends she had lost, and the lovers . . . and the friend whom she loved more than anyone. She thought of Ramus constantly, trying to imagine him falling or broken at the bottom of the Great Divide. Those images would not come. What she saw was Ramus wandering these new landscapes, avoiding the Sentinels and exploring farther inland, dodging sentries, making his way deeper than even the Sentinels had gone. She tried not to see the agony in his eyes as the sickness ground him down. And when she imagined him writhing amongst strange grasses and plants she could not identify, dying of the sickness she had sent to him, she screamed the image away.
Perhaps he's closer than I think. She took a bite of one of the orange fruits and it was rotten on the inside. She threw it away, gagging. A Sentinel stood on the grille above her and stared down, blocking out most of the light, and when it saw the discarded fruit it reached beyond the pit and dropped in some more. Nomi let them fall to the ground. If they were not corrupted as they fell, they were when they struck.
“I'm sorry, Ramus,” she said. She realized it was the very first time she had thought those words, let alone uttered them.
HER SECOND MORNING in the pit, Nomi was woken by the sound of Sentinels calling in the distance. She kept her eyes closed in an effort to hang on to her dreams, but Beko fell away from her and his smile faded as the ground pulled him down. If he hits the ground in my dreams, he'll really die, she thought, but she opened her eyes because he was already dead.
There were no Sentinels above her. She could see deep blue sky through the heavy timber grating, with a few wispy clouds moving slowly from left to right. She inhaled but smelled only the pit, and she tried to recall the taste of unspoiled fruit, to drive her sickness down. Her skin was gritty with dust and dirt. She desperately needed to wash, and she hoped they would bring her a jug of water soon.
The Sentinels' call came in again, a hooting and bellowing the likes of which she had not heard before. It was so distant that she could have been mistaken, and she stood, opened her mouth and exhaled slowly, striving to hear more.
Next time the call came it was closer. Then closer still, the same collection of rising and falling notes, as though one call was echoing in from the distance.
All around the pit, in whatever settlement they had brought her to, Sentinels started crying out. She heard them dashing here and there in apparent panic, and heard a few growls and snarls as the creatures collided. A shadow fell over her pit and quickly passed, and Nomi recognized the willowy waving of a creature's long limbs.
“Hello!” she called. She was suddenly afraid that if they left, she would remain down here unfed and unwatered for an unknown length of time. They were looking after her now, but though they thought her pregnant she did not seem special to them. The pit proved that. The pit, and that stinking bloody mass in the far corner that she had doggedly refused to examine. “Hey, ugly pissers! Where's my food? Where's my fucking water?”
Sordon's words came back to her, his unwanted descriptions of wars the Sentinels had fought against one another. Perhaps this was another such battle, starting because she had arrived with something else unborn for them to worship.
Nomi paced the small pit, five steps one way, five the other. She heard Sentinels calling again in the distance, and the silence above and around her suggested they had just left.
“Hello!” she shouted again. “Food! Water!”
“They can't hear you,” Sordon Perlenni said. She could not yet see him but she knew that he was close, perhaps sitting a few steps away from the pit and listening to her growing panic.
“What's happening?” Nomi asked.
Sordon started chuckling, then laughing, but there was nothing of humor there at all. He sounded mad. He tried to talk but his laughter increased, and it eventually turned into loud, extended sobbing.
“Sordon!” Nomi called. She jumped and held on to the timber grating, trying to pull herself up. But her arms were still weakened from the climb. “What is it? Why have they gone?”
“The God,” he said at last, stuttering the words between sobs. “The Fallen God. Someone is going for it.”
“It's close?” she asked, feeling a thrill of fear.
“Not so far away,” he said. “Is it your Ramus?”
“Ramus died. He—”
“I'm here to let you out,” he said. “Listen to me, Nomi. If he's close—”
“I can't trust you,” she said. “You left me hanging there on that rack. Used me to calm your own sick guilt.”
His head appeared above the edge of the pit for the first time, and in his old man's eyes Nomi saw such terror that she slumped to her knees, trying to draw as far away from him as possible.
“This is much more than either of us!” he hissed. “This is about the whole of Noreela, all of it—the Noreela you know, and here, and whatever may lie beyond. The God . . . can you possibly imagine? Can you even attempt to think of what that thing is, when the power of all the Sleeping Gods combined could only manage to put it down to sleep? Something that can't be killed. Something so wrong . . .” He trailed off and looked past her at the floor of her pit, and deeper still. She wondered what he saw.
“Is it buried?” she asked.
“Of course. A cave. An abyss, deeper than anyone knows.”
“You've been in?”
“No one has been in. No human, no Sentinel, no one and nothing since it was put down. But now the Sentinels panic, and if they panic like this, it's because someone has approached closer than ever before.”
“Ramus,” Nomi said.
Sordon stared at her, sober and serious. “Can you stop him? I'm here to let you out, but can you stop him from doing whatever it is he intends?”
“I don't think so,” she said. “He can turn people to stone.”
Sordon Perlenni had started working at the ties locking the grating, but now he stopped and stared down at her. “He knows that?”
“He does. He's used it.”
Sordon frowned, his old man's face wrinkling even more.
“We have parchment pages found on a body at the base of the Divide. Ramus . . . he's an academic. He must have translated the words.”
Sordon nodded, his face suddenly slack and eyes dark. He was fumbling at the ropes holding the grating down, his breath coming faster. “An old Sentinel weapon,” he said. “They had many, once, bestowed upon their ancestors by the Sleeping Gods. So much to protect them other than just tooth and claw. I'm not sure any of them can even speak them anymore, but if your Ramus knows the curse . . .”
“You'll have to tell me the way.”
Sordon nodded, gasped and lifted the cover from the pit.
Nomi jumped and held on to the pit's lip, struggling to haul herself out. Sordon did not help. He could not, because he seemed to suddenly be his true age, sitting aside like a dying thing bleeding its last into the ground, face sagging, breath light. But his eyes were still strong, and filled with reflections of calamity.
“You must stop him,” Sordon said. “The sleeper cannot be woken.”
He told her the way. Without a backward glance Nomi left Sordon Perlenni, the First Voyager, sitting beside the pit that would have become the site of her violent death.
In a way, perhaps Ramus really had saved her.
FEAR GAVE HER
speed; that, and the sudden sense of a freedom she had least expected. She quickly left the Sentinels' settlement, a collection of ragged hutlike structures that barely formed a village, and found their path through the long grass easy to follow. There must have been many of them on the move to leave this much damaged vegetation behind.
Three of them had killed Beko, Noon and Rhiana. Even if Ramus did wield the curse against them, surely this many Sentinels would kill him in the end?
Yet as she ran, Nomi's intentions were far from clear. If he really was going down for the Fallen God, who was she to stop him? Perhaps she would join him, Voyagers together, as they should have been all the way through this journey. She had met Sordon Perlenni and he was mad, and could she really let his exhortations steer Ramus—and perhaps her as well—from the greatest discovery in history?
A Sleeping God . . . They were the stuff of legend. Who was to say it had fallen? Sordon? Perhaps everything he had told her was a lie.
Nomi snorted as she ran, enjoying the feel of her heart galloping and sweat forming on her forehead and upper lip.
Yet the Sentinels were here for something. She had seen evidence of what they had once been, and there was no denying that some event in their history had driven them back toward their animalistic origins. What could make them regress like that? she wondered. Just one man and the stories he brought?
There was so much to know, explore and discover, but as she ran she sensed that her time here was drawing to a close. Things were about to change.
The Sentinels' trail lost itself in a small forest but she ran straight on, hoping to pick it up again once the trees ended. Soon she could run no longer and she slowed to a brisk walk, pausing to take a drink from one of the many streams flowing between the trees. A low mist hung off to her left, and she saw steam rising from the ground around several huge trees. It seemed to curl around their trunks and caress the bark, and the trees were dark from continuous soaking. Nomi could feel its clamminess from here.
