The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  Nappy chased after them, not daring to fire for fear of striking Chan-ti. She screamed and flailed against the scyldar’s intractable hold. Then they reached the lynk and disappeared.

  Tully Gunther could still feel the scyldar who carried his damaged brain. Unbridled pain coursed through him from his shoulder and weakness expanded like smoke in him. He thought only of escape with the woman his prey desired. Tully felt the rightness of that strategy. With his wounds, he could not attack Ned O’Tennis. He had to flee, into the Overworld, to a lynk that would carry him back to the nongyls and the Face of Night. The schoolteacher felt him dwindling along the lynklanes, lumbering into the invisible world all around them.

  “You coward!” Nappy bellowed at Gorlik, who knelt trembling before him. “I should kill you now!” The laserbolt pistol shook in his furious hand.

  “Don’t kill me, Nappy Groff!” Gorlik pleaded, clutching the old man’s ank-les. “The scyldar surprised me. I thought he was dead.”

  “You should be dead now for what you did. You let the scyldar have her! You gave my daughter to that monster!”

  “No, Nappy—no! I was surprised. I fled in surprise.”

  “Get up, coward! Get to your feet.” He pulled Gorlik up by his hair. “You will find her.”

  “What?”

  Nappy waved the big pistol toward the lynk. “Go! You can track her. Go! Or I swear by the horizons themselves I will kill you where you stand.”

  “The Aesirai is here,” Gorlik protested. “We should wait for him. He could help us.”

  “No! Each second we wait, the scyldar retreats deeper into the Overworld. He is wounded. We must catch him at once, before he destroys my daughter. Go, Bram Gorlik— or die!”

  Gorlik and Nappy Groff scampered across the fields, pausing just long enough to harvest two heads of klivoth kakta before running hard into the lynk.

  Minutes later, Ned O’Tennis and Pahang came wading through the sand. Joao’s ghost had assured them they would find Chan-ti Beppu here—yet, there was no sign of anyone.

  Pahang recognized this as the oasis they had visited earlier, in a former time, when the temple had been bedecked with human skulls. The skulls were gone, and over the centuries new trees had sprouted. The ruins had melted a little.

  As they had been gliding in for a landing, they had seen the blue shine of water on the horizon, evidence of the agritecture reshaping this planet during the Age of the Crystal Mind; once again, Ned felt gratitude for his ship’s shadowary hull, which protected them from detection by whatever forces controlled the region.

  Foraging for the yellow-berries he had enjoyed here before, the Malay found Neter Col’s arm and the bodies of Spooner and Moku.

  Pahang poked at the severed arm with a stick. “Big man. Lost much blood. Will die soon. Maybe already.”

  Ned picked up the laserifle that Spooner clutched. “Aesirai design,” he muttered, stalking up the rise to the wall where the Beast lay. “I’ve never seen any creature like this before.”

  “Ugly. Distort, lah?”

  “Yeah. Both the distort and the old man were killed just minutes ago.” He swept the rifle about, looking for the killer in the profusion of grass and shrubs among the cluttered ruins. Spooner’s sack sat on a flat rock, but Ned did not approach it. He recognized the red-seam wiring that signaled explosives.

  Pahang tilted the helmet he wore further back on his head and bent to the ground. “Here there was some scuffle. Look how the grass bends. Six people, two small, very light, and one a woman. See her prints. This must be her hair.” He held up a few strands of long dark hair. “And this print, this is where that big distort stood. These smaller belong to the dead man with the silver hair. And this—” He stood up and read the ruffled grass. “The big man with one arm, that man killed the distort and the old one – and he took the woman. See her print vanish and his deepen? He carried her that way.” He pointed down the staggered terrain to the wide archway of the lynk. “How—with one arm? He is powerful!”

  Ned hurried to Pahang’s side and examined the hairs he had found. “Chan-ti’s, I think.” In the grass, he found a cassette with a clear housing of flashing microlights. He removed the sender chip from his translator, and when he moved the chip around the finder, the directional lights followed it. “Someone abducted her.”

  Tully Gunther willed himself closer to the red-haired man with the Teuton countenance. This was the one who could assure the end of these nightmare worlds. This was the one Neter Col wanted to kill. He pushed closer against the cold and the rushing air, floating nearer.

  “Yah! Hawk—look! Behind you!” Pahang shouted.

  Ned spun about, rifle leveled. A wisp of glitter trembled in the sunlight above the grassheads. It came and went, then brightened sharply and displayed features. At first glimpse, Ned had thought that this was Joao again. Then, he saw that the visage was different, not the curly-haired ghost from Ioli but a ferret-faced one, an older man.

  Tully Gunther urged himself nearer through the cold, buffeting wind. He touched Ned’s face.

  Ned leaped to the side at the cold gust of sparkling wind that puffed across his cheek. A voice opened in him, and he went still.

  Pahang moaned, recognizing the inward stare of a trance.

  “Ned O’Tennis—can you hear me?” Tully called.

  “Yes, I hear you. Who are you? Did Joao send you?”

  “No one sent me. I am Tully Gunther, the ghost of a man’s brain held captive in a scyldar body—the body of Neter Col, sent by Saor to kill you.”

  “Saor?”

  “Yes—the Face of Night sees your timeline reaching a future it dislikes.” In a jingle of hot light, the ghost swayed before Ned, relaying everything he knew, and Ned repeated it all aloud for Pahang to hear.

  “Ghosts are trouble,” the Malay said, keeping a respectful distance.

  Ned was already on his way back to the strohlkraft, to see how much power the ramstat cells needed before he could fly. “This ghost knows where Chan-ti is. That’s all Joao promised we’d find on this passage. He kept his word. It’s all we have to go on.”

  “But how can ghosts be here?”

  “I’m not really a ghost,” Tully corrected. “Neter Col was wounded and my brain damaged. But he lives. As long as he lives, so does my brain. That’s why my body of light can be here. I am free of my body but I seem to have melled with you. I think it’s an effect of coming from the same time as you. Even so, only the scyldar’s strength sustains me. I am an energy projection of his form. If he dies, I will be free. But if he continues to live, the nongyls will heal my brain, and I will be drawn back into his body. We must hurry. I don’t know how long I can stay like this.”

  The cold was obscuring. During the long minutes he needed to explain himself, he had grown weaker. In the air before them, he became no more than a blur, a heat wisp. The telempathic chemicals from the klivoth kakta that the Aesirai had consumed earlier enabled him to receive Tully’s communication, but even that thinned. “I can lead you to Neter Col. I can take you to his prisoner, Chan-ti Beppu. He wants that. He wants to kill you.”

  “Better we go on without Beppu,” Pahang stated, emphatically. “Your life must not be forfeited for a woman.”

  Ned walked around the lynk, toward the strohlkraft. The utility bin there had a collapsible spade he would need to bury the bodies and their utility sacks; the bulky one with the explosives would go on top to guard their corpses. “Pahang, you don’t have to come with me. I have to find Chan-ti. She came after me.” He patted the sleeve-pocket where he had placed the directional finder and Chan-ti’s sender chip. “Joao was right. We were right to listen to him.”

  “You cannot save her.”

  “I know. But with Gai’s help we can.”

  “We left Gai, lah? Gai told us to use only her portals. We cannot go back to her easily.”

  “We can—with Tully Gunther. I’ll wager that Gai could learn much from him, if we can transport him.”

>   “How will we find her?”

  “The only lynk we know that’s hers is the seacave on Ioli. We’ll go there.”

  Pahang moaned loudly. “I fear that god.”

  “You can stay.”

  “Here?” He gestured at the weedy ruins in their bed of sand. “Better to go with you to death. Maybe this time I will stay dead. Lah.”

  Tully Gunther heard them talking as if from a great distance. Gliding along icy currents, he followed them through heat curtains to their craft. Too cold to be elated, he nonetheless enjoyed his abrupt freedom. Bodiless, quivering with loose energy, he drifted after them, free for now yet not forgetting to what dark power he belonged.

  THE SAGAS

  Each person stands on a shadow.

  No entering the temple without facing the demons.

  Every mountain is but a tombstone under heaven.

  The stream goes only where it must go. Follow it.

  —admonishments from the Glyph Astra

  The blind horizon of Mugna blackened the transparent shell of the droplift, and Fra Baba Bathra glimpsed his own reflection—bald, fetal-browed, lumpy—before starside swung into view, hurting his little eyes with the brash glare of the galaxy. Moments ago, he had been where he spent most of his life, languishing on thermal squabs in midstim euphoria. The afterglow rapidly thinned into the blunt details of the ordinary, and he chewed a gly-tab to buoy his mood. He hated being yanked from midstim. The abrupt drop from pleasure-trance to temporal reality soured him, no matter that he had been roused to attend to a situation of stark interest to the Face of Night.

  Only after the droplift sighed to a halt and admitted him to the esplanade before the gruesome gateway to Perdur did the abject impersonality of his position, of his very life, come clear again. He straightened the folds of his black robe, swallowed the gly-tab, and stepped onto the mirror floor of the cliff-high palace. He did not look upon the gargoyles of tormented bodies cast in green amber or the spires of skulls or the scorpion-tail buttresses and serpent-coil pillars. His gaze remained fixed ahead, to where a vast dolmen of scarlet rock set in the black wall of the palace framed the tiny figures of Neter Col and his captive.

  The aides who had unplugged him from midstim had already briefed him on everything the scyldar knew. There was no further use for the creature at this moment, but only Fra Baba Bathra, Prime Cenobite of Perdur, had the authority to dismiss him; so, Neter Col waited in broad stance with the girl he had taken folded over herself at his feet, her arm still in his clutch.

  Fra Baba winced at the sight of the raw bone in the scyldar’s ripped socket. “Release her, Neter Col,” he commanded, above his own echoing footfalls. “You are dismissed.”

  The scyldar dropped Chan-ti Beppu’s arm and strode toward the lustrous dark rampart. The collar of his cuirass dangled, unlatched, and by that Fra Baba knew the zōtl rider had left. He drew a full breath of relief at that, for the unpredictable spiders had the implicit right to mount any human, even the Prime Cenobite of Perdur.

  At the glisteny wall, nongyls scuttled from shadowed niches, their sucker mouths still fibrillating with the appetites they had been sating at the nutrient-glossed parapet. They crawled onto Neter Col, covering his torn socket and the jagged hole in his faceplate, and he slouched off to the vats.

  “Chan-ti Beppu—” Fra Baba spoke to the curled-over woman, gently. Everything said in this polar palace, the Face of Night heard. The god, through the Cenobite’s aides, had already instructed him to protect the well-being and, if possible, the happy disposition of the woman. “I regret the suffering you endured to arrive here,” he attempted and sounded unconvincing even to himself.

  Chan-ti looked up through tear-splattered lenses and disheveled hair, haggard with fatigue from her vain struggle with the scyldar. She had seen the spider crawl out of the scyldar. She had seen it crawl out and hover in the air before the smashed-in faceplate. It had droned past her, icing her with the terror of its pithing tube, before darting away into the darkness of the dolmen-lynk. That fear played across her face when she confronted the obsequious voice above her.

  “Don’t be afraid.” He smiled weakly, intrigued by her spectacles and the soft planes of her cheeks. She had something of a reindeer’s face, he thought. “You are not going to be harmed. I am Fra Baba Bathra, Prime Cenobite of Perdur—”

  “You are a Saor-priest.”

  “In fact. And you are my prisoner here on Mugna. Please get up.” Fra Baba, impatient to return to his midstim now that he had dismissed Neter Col, signaled for his priests to lift the girl to her feet. Two cowled shadows detached from obscure alcoves and hoisted Chan-ti upright.

  She craned her neck to see the spike-crest of the palace ramparts rising a hundred meters above her. The entablature, encrusted with the shapes of giant broken bodies, jutted across the spiral arms of the galaxy. “Where am I?”

  “I have told you,” the bald priest replied patiently. “This is the palace of Perdur—”

  “Perdur is on the north pole of Mugna,” she said, eyes intent. “You can’t see the galaxy from there.”

  Fra Baba straightened and squinted a closer appraisal of this primitive-looking woman. “You have some knowledge of Mugna, I see. Yes, we live directly under the Face of Night here in Perdur. What you witness above you is but a reflection in space bent by Saor’s gravity. It is visible twice in our annum. If you look closely, you will observe that the stars are smudged.”

  Chan-ti kept her gaze on the pudgy-jowled priest. “You serve the zōtl. I saw it crawl out of that thing that brought me here. Is there one in you, too?”

  Fra Baba shivered at the thought and felt for a reply. Silence gave him rein. “Saor-priests work with the zōtl. We both serve the Face of Night.”

  “Ha!” Her lip quivered, yet she kept her gaze steady. “The thing that kidnapped me killed my father and our friend.”

  “Surely, they must have attacked our scyldar. He did look ruffled somewhat.”

  Chan-ti’s gaze thinned with ire. “Why am I here?”

  “That hardly matters.” Fra Baba’s tiny mouth showed tiny teeth. The Face of Night wanted her unknowing, and he enjoyed obfuscation. “You certainly cannot stay in Perdur, anyway. We are a priestly sect. So, why you are here is meaningless.” The eyebores under his swollen brow stared indifferently. “You will be taken to a croft in the Overworld, where you will live and work peacefully until your days are spent. Oh, don’t look so stricken. You will have a new life, among new people. It will not be so horrible. You shall see.” He waved her away, and the priests at her sides turned her toward the dolmen.

  “Why?” She twisted about to challenge the Prime Cenobite. “Why am I your prisoner? What do you want from me?”

  Fra Baba watched, smiling dimly, until she disappeared in the zōtl lynk. When he had first learned from the Face of Night that Ned O’Tennis’ timeline had cleanly mated with that of a Foke woman who tracked him through the Overworld, he was perplexed. What could bind such disparate types as the clannish Foke and the haughty Aesirai? Now, at least, he understood what the sky-fighter saw in this clever, fawn-cheeked hoyden. She owned a defiant spirit. She had met his gaze knowing he could be a grub. Little good that verve would do her among the benighted humans who lived on the Dragon’s Shank, where she was bound. The silence in his brain, however, assured him that this was not his concern.

  Anticipation of the thermal squabs waiting to cradle him into midstim diminished his interest in this woman or her Aesirai lover. He had fulfilled his duty to the Face of Night. She would be held to lure Ned O’Tennis, and after his demise she would belong to the zōtl. Pleased with himself, he turned and hurried back toward the droplift that would carry him to a cloudbank far from the petty lives of this mindless creation.

  *

  Lynx-eyed Gorlik squatted in a thicket of alders, watching the red dolmen, while Nappy climbed a shadowy spruce, pistol tucked in his belt. They had tracked Beppu’s timeline among the grasses, river pebbles, an
d star-rays of the Overworld and had leapt from a crumbling ledge on the backs of antelope to reach a square lynk that had led here, to these alder flats above plunging palisades and forest slopes of the Dragon’s Shank. They had arrived in time to behold Chan-ti force-walked between two hooded Saor-priests out of a red dolmen set in a black cliff face. Four other priests followed from the onyx cliff. Not until Nappy crept high into the spruce did he perceive that the cliff was not a cliff at all but the immense rampart of an ebony citadel, a fortress built of night, shining blackly along a coast of smeared stars.

  Clinging to the tremulous tip of the spruce, Nappy watched as Beppu marched toward a flight field on a cleared slope dazzlingly lit with halogen scaffolds. The priests took her past glinting insect-framed flyers to a raft of small, sleek vehicles on runners, like ultra-contoured sleighs. They strapped her struggling into the craft. Its thrusters glowed blue with the electron fire of a ramstat engine, and the vehicle launched into the dark sky.

  Nappy peered after the sparkblue body dwindling down the forest gulfs of the Dragon’s Shank. He noted well where it vanished; then, he shimmied down the spruce. “This is Perdur,” he told Gorlik. “And we are indeed on the Dragon’s Shank, as we thought.”

  Gorlik grunted. The swift and arduous trek through the Overworld had exorcised the terror that had gripped him in the presence of the scyldar, and he felt ashamed. His courage had been legendary among the Foke, especially after his grief sojourn, repenting his love for Chan-ti Beppu. Now that he had displayed mindless fear before her and had abandoned her to the scyldar, she could never be his. That he knew with the certitude of his own mortality. But honor, ghostly substitute for love, could yet be reclaimed. “What of Beppu? I heard the rale of a flightsled.”

  “That was her. The priests shot her down the mountain. Hush. Here they come.”

  The six Saor-priests filed back along the ledge trail and disappeared into the dolmen-entry to Perdur.