by John Daulton
Exultant, Gromf did it four more times, running closer with each cast and chanting the spell more violently.
Then someone shouted at him from the open place at the back of the broken thing that had crashed into the wall, a human voice, an obvious challenge for a fight.
He spun to face the fool, expecting another human in the steel armor like the rest. But it was not. It was a male human, shorter than most, bulky in the chest and with darker skin than the flesh of the golden queen’s kind. This man wore no armor, though his clothing was still unlike any human garment Gromf had ever seen, black and gray, with a strange glittering button near his neck. He carried in his hand a strange weapon, similar in ways to the shape of the small crossbows humans used, but this one had no bow at the end, nor did it seem loaded with a bolt. It glowed in places along its shiny black length with a type of fire Gromf had never seen before either, in all, its use beyond reckoning. But Gromf knew it was a weapon by the way the human leveled it at him. The human said something, wiping as he did at a trickle of blood on his forehead. The human’s finger moved on the weapon and, for a moment at least, Gromf saw a thin red beam of light.
Chapter 36
Altin and Orli arrived at the Temple of Anvilwrath in Crown City only moments after the smoke-lettered summons from High Priestess Maul had appeared. Altin’s teleport placed them behind a huge column at the top of the front steps, a vantage of such altitude that it granted them a view of the city stretching away to the east, west and south. From that lofty locale, they could see that fires burned in many locations along the southern wall, and in places, the smoke rose from neighborhoods much closer to the temple than the wall, as much as a half measure into the city, the black plumes blowing eastward in jagged smears, marking the path of the demon disease as it began to encroach. Around the city they could see the red streaks of laser fire coming through the cloud layer above, the starships in orbit doing their part to burn back the attackers around the city. That was heartening, as were the small mushroom clouds in the distance, bright flashes that had Altin gawking for a time.
“It is as if the nine levels of hell truly have opened,” he said. “These are the things of myth, the things of gods.”
“No, these are the things of human history,” Orli replied. “This is what’s wrong with us.”
That was true, and Altin nodded. It was all he could do to suppress the urge to get back to the wall and help them. Orli saw it in the look that came across his face, the way his lips rolled in and the inclination of his posture toward the stairs. She touched his arm, turning him to look at her. She shook her head.
The tension bending him toward the fight released as he saw the truth of the situation in her eyes. It wouldn’t be enough. He faced back toward the temple interior again. “All right, let’s go.”
If the Temple of Anvilwrath in Leekant could be said to be immense, grandiose and spectacular, then the temple in Crown City was nothing less than the absolute manifestation of architectural strength and power. Nothing in the city besides the Palace competed with it in terms of scope, scale or awe. Where the Palace was audacious, ambitious and elegant with its spires climbing a half measure into the sky, the house of Anvilwrath was vast, stalwart and brutal. Though he had been there before, Altin couldn’t help wonder as the two of them ran inside, moving deeper and deeper into the maze of its thick colonnades, if either demon or “tactical nuke” could do such a place any harm. It seemed to possess a solidity that must be invincible. The sheer scale was hard to comprehend, not in height but in endlessness. They ran and ran and ran, and yet the rows and rows of massive columns seemed never to stop. No end appeared, no change in the sameness of all those trunks of stone, every one thirty spans high and at least half that in diameter. The carvings changed, the runes changed, but never the scale or density. It was as if they had come into the realm of squat colonnades, some strange place where there existed only cylindrical stone and the space between them.
So run they did, on and on, winding through what seemed at least a full measure before coming into the “outer courtyard,” which was a term, given the distance they’d come, that might have made them both laugh at some other time, some less dire place in history.
The young priestess Klovis was there to greet them as they emerged into the open air of this expanse. Her rust-hued robes were torn, a long rent straight down the front of them, gaping and revealing a red line of dried blood running down between her breasts clear to her navel.
She saw both Altin’s and Orli’s eyes go to the wound and gave a grim smile as she too looked down at it. “That one was close,” she said, nodding as she did. “Yet Anvilwrath seems to have further use for me.”
The two of them nodded at the priestess, glad to see her spirits were still high. “I got the Maul’s summons. Where is she?” Altin asked.
“She is with the Grand Maul below. We’ve just come back from the field. Anvilwrath has shown us where you must go. Come.” She turned then and took off at a run, leading them across the courtyard and deeper into the heart of the temple. They ran for a long while, longer than before. Orli was in exquisite shape, but Altin began to tire. His was not a runner’s heart, which forced the two women to slow their pace.
“Don’t you people recruit any teleporters?” he asked after a time, panting with the effort of going on.
“We are here,” said Klovis nearly as the words had left his lips. She stopped at the end of a corridor down which they’d been running for what seemed to Altin at least a hundred years. It ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac, around the edge of which were twenty-five candles burning in fluted glass of cobalt blue. In the center of this ring, inlaid into the mottled brown stone of the floor, was the image of a pair of crossed war hammers in polished steel.
Klovis hoisted her robe up as she stepped between two candles and motioned for them to stand with her inside the ring. They did, and a moment after they were far below.
Huge braziers lined the walls at intervals around the chamber into which they appeared, each alight and filled with burning orange flames that licked up the walls like dragon’s breath. The space into which they had come was enormous, and looking up, Altin could see stalactites sparkling in the lofty darkness. The natural vault, the glimmering work of nature, gave way to the work of men as Altin’s gaze traced its surface around from high above, its angles and seeming imperfection flattening closer to the floor, the coarse stone transformed to polished smoothness which, farther down, was hung with tapestries. The whole of it, the transformation from the wild to the worked, gave the room an unfinished feeling, as if the priests had only been allowed to work up the first twenty spans and then left the rest alone, a compromise between man and gods taking place up there. He supposed there was probably some mystical reasoning for such things but had no time to seek the story behind it all.
Gathered at the center of the vast chamber, some hundred paces at least beyond where the three of them had just appeared, was a small crowd, most in the rusty robes of Anvilwrath, but a few figures that were not. Altin recognized High Priestess Maul right off, as well as two other figures, a young woman in the gray robes of a teleporter and a skinny young man in brown trousers and a tunic of homespun: two of his former students, Tribbey Redquill and Caulfin Sunderhusk. That gave him pause. He looked the question of their presence to Klovis, but she was already moving off the crossed hammers upon which they now stood, stepping through the ring of cobalt-housed candles and heading toward the assembly deeper in the room.
The group, almost as one, turned to face them at the moment of their arrival, and High Priestess Maul stepped forward out of the group right away. “Good, you came quickly,” she said to Altin. “There may still be time.”
From the center of the crowd emerged a tiny figure, a man so old and frail he seemed on the very edge of turning straight to dust. He sat upon a wicker chair which had been set upon a plank with wheels attached. A young acolyte pushed him toward Altin and Orli, and High Priestess Maul, in
deference, gave way.
The little man slowly thrust his head forward like some gristly tortoise emerging from its shell, and he stared first at Altin, then the Earth woman standing nearby, his eyes glittering in the firelight as he considered them in turn. The arm he raised to point at them was little more than a pair of sticks wrapped in the splotchy velum of his skin, and the mangle of his old fingers shook as he marked the two new arrivals with what served as a pointing motion in the air. “They have come,” he said in a dusty croaking voice. A proclamation for the room. “The Seven and the Alien. Come to beg the mercy of Anvilwrath.”
Orli glanced to Altin, who glanced back and shrugged. He’d never met the Grand Maul before, but he knew who the man was, and he had no intention of showing disrespect, no matter how farfetched or even ridiculous whatever might be coming turned out to be.
“Five worlds,” rasped the man who had held the highest office in the Church for nearly six hundred years. “One for each hand of Anvilwrath. Three human worlds, plagued by arrogance. Hope weeps for Feydore in another. And the fifth grips the hammer of his judgment. Justice comes and even Hope’s sorrow is not enough. Our time nears its end.”
He motioned for the acolyte tasked with pushing his chair to move him still closer to Altin and Orli, right up until the plank’s edge bumped against Orli’s shins. His tortoise head stretched to its fullest length, the wattles of his neck hanging loose like pale, soggy prune skins draped from the tendons visible beneath.
Altin glanced back to Orli again, but she was staring into the old man’s eyes as if hypnotized. Perhaps she was. Altin couldn’t know. He looked back and saw the Grand Maul’s gaze narrowing at him. “The Seven doubts,” the old priest said. “And the Alien does not believe.”
“We believe,” Altin said. “Sort of. We need to know where it is. The big one. The male.”
“You would disarm Anvilwrath,” hissed the old man, his face shaking with the violence of the expulsion, the waddles swinging wildly. “You would kill him if possible.” His body was old, beyond crumbling, held together by willpower alone, but those eyes were steady and strong. They compelled Altin to speak.
“Yes,” he said. “We would.”
“No!” Orli exclaimed almost violently in response. “We would ask him to stop. We would plead our case to him, as I have, as we both have, to Blue Fire. If she can be reasoned with, so can the new male. But you have to tell us where he is. If you know, please, we don’t have time to wait. The demons are in the city now, and all of Earth is being devoured. Tell us. Let us try.”
The Grand Maul smiled then, his cracked lips a rip in the brittle pages of an ancient book. “It will not be enough.”
“If not, then we die and your prophecy comes true,” Orli said. “No surprises for you people at least, right? So let us try. Where is he?”
The Grand Maul laughed then, a deep and honest laugh that rattled out from the cage of his storied bones. He raised the gnarled palsy of his left hand and, without a word, the acolyte behind him pulled his chair away and turned him around. The youth wheeled the Grand Maul back through the crowd of priests, which parted before him like city pigeons beneath the tread of tourist feet. He came to rest at the top stair of a wide, circular pit, five concentric rings leading down to the bottom of what Altin knew was a hkalamate pit. He’d been in the bottom of one of them before.
The Grand Maul waved again and the acolyte turned him back around to face the rest of the room. “These children will show you the way,” he said, pointing at Tribbey Redquill and Caulfin Sunderhusk with his eyes. “And the Alien will show us what their maps mean in her device. Then we will speak to Anvilwrath. Not you.” He slid icy scorn across Orli and Altin in turns. “Unbelief is what brought us here.”
Altin shrugged. He didn’t care who talked to the new Hostile world. Just so long as someone did, and did it quick. Part of him was willing to admit that these priests were probably better suited to it than he was anyway.
The Grand Maul made a hissing sound and jerked with his head in a way that sent Tribbey Redquill and the slender Caulfin Sunderhusk scurrying to where Altin and Orli were. Caulfin unrolled a parchment and held it stretched before them while Tribbey started to explain.
“This is a basic star map we made,” she said. “It’s not to scale because, well, we’d have had to do it on enchanted mammoth skin, which we didn’t have time for. But, it’s a start. This is where we are, here.” She pointed to a symbol like a tiny sun drawn near the bottom of the chart, three finger-widths left of center. “Over here is Blue Fire.” Again she pointed near the lower edge, a little higher up and two finger-widths right of center this time. When they’d seen it, she moved her finger again. “And this one here is Earth.” The mark was a third of the way up the map, a half hand from the left edge. “Now this is where the scale issues came up, but this makes the point.” She flicked Caulfin’s fingers where they covered a portion of the top edge of the map. He moved them without complaint. “This is what we believe is the location of … Anvilwrath.” She glanced to the cluster of priests nearby and smiled, then gave Altin and Orli a private look, which each understood entirely.
The map in between and all around these three sun-symbol shapes was dotted by various other symbols, the shapes of constellations Altin had known all his life and that Orli had learned only recently. They both stared at the map for a time, Altin looking up first. He looked askance at Orli, then back at the map. Eventually she looked up too. She saw that everyone was watching her expectantly, waiting for her to explain what the map “meant” in her “alien” device.
“I don’t think I can do anything with that,” she said bluntly. She glanced to Altin and then back across the gathering. “There’s just not enough there.”
“There’s more,” Tribbey said. She took the map from Caulfin and motioned for him to go on with his part. “Do your map.”
“So,” stuttered the youngster, growing nervous now, “I’m not sure how good this is, but we came up with this one too. It’s a spell I wrote based on the models the fleet’s computers make.” He started casting immediately, and a moment later, an illusion appeared in the air just behind the green-eyed mage and the Earth girl. They turned together to look, following the direction of so many other pairs of eyes, and saw it there, a huge three-dimensional star map twice Altin’s height and twice that again both deep and wide.
Upon seeing it, Orli took the scroll from Tribbey and walked into the illusion, unfurling the parchment as she went. She looked back and forth, trying to find Prosperion’s sun. Caulfin, guessing her purpose, helped her by having one star amongst them all pulse and give off a note like the striking of a tiny bell. The star was near her foot, near the nearest edge of the illusionary map.
“That’s Prosperion’s sun,” he said. “And here is Blue Fire.” Again a star pulsed brightly and once more came a single sound, though a different note this time. The star was higher, up at the level of Orli’s calf, but it too occupied space close to where she’d stepped into the area of the spell. If she spread her feet apart, she could touch them both with her legs. “Here is Earth,” he said, and again came a tone. Two steps into the illusion another star pulsed, this one about chest high.
Orli walked right to it and stared at the golden speck of it for a moment, almost expecting to see tiny planets revolving around the depiction of Earth’s sun, Sol. She turned back and looked through the illusion at Altin and the rest of them standing there. She could not help but think they were a remarkable people, and though she dreaded what was to come, she was glad she knew that they were here, living on this world that was so different, yet so terribly the same as the place she’d come from.
“This one way back here, near the top, is the one I’m calling Red Fire,” Caulfin said.
That drew Orli up and spun her around. She went straight to where the ringing sound had been, tipping her head back and seeing a bright red spot pulsing near the uppermost edge. “It’s a red sun,” she said.
> “Yes,” Tribbey jumped in. “That is what you suggested we might be looking for in the male Hostile, and with the help of the priests here, we’ve divined this star map. I couldn’t verify it, of course, with the fleet being gone and us having lost access to all their machinery, but we were hoping you could do that for us now.”
Orli was already pulling the tablet out of her waistband, and soon she was tapping up the star maps in its memory. If Caulfin’s illusionary galaxy was even remotely accurate, the star in question was a long way from Earth. If the spell depicted the distances even remotely close to reality, she estimated the red star must be hundreds of light years from Earth at least.
Once she had the charts called up, she moved back to the golden speck that was Sol and, from that vantage, pointed the tablet’s input lens up toward the red sun at the far upper edge of the illusionary map. She saved the image to memory and then checked the star patterns against what she had on file, wondering as she did so if an illusion would even register on video. What if that kind of magic was all in the mind? She’d never thought to ask.
It did not register.
“It’s not working,” she said. “It doesn’t pick up on video.”
Tribbey pointed at the map, which Orli had rolled up and tucked under her arm. “That’s why we made that one.”
Fortunately, the parchment star pattern did register when Orli scanned it with her tablet, and with a bit of resizing, Orli was able to query the records for a pattern match. She found one almost immediately, a red supergiant star listed as Cep 128a1. It was an extremely young star by star standards, barely forty million years old, and it was huge, over ninety times the mass of the suns that nurtured Earth and Prosperion. It was also very far away, over a thousand light years from Earth. And rounding out the bad news, the entry said nothing about planets around it at all.
She scanned through the article, but there was little else she could use. There was little there at all, just a name, coordinates and the brief estimates about its size and age. But at least she knew where it was in relation to Earth. She could have pointed it out to Altin from Earth if they were there, or at least from near Earth once they were beyond the glare of all its lights.
