“Why are you doing this?!” I screamed. “What are you?!”
“Please, Jo, surely you know that it’s me.” Barbas laughed, his voice rich with genuine pleasure. “And I’m real now! Isn’t this wonderful?”
I backed away from him unsteadily. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
He shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do. Besides, I- well, we, need that fabricator on your back.” He abruptly lunged forward, faster than any man should have been able to move, and his bare fist struck me in the head, smashing right through my quartz faceplate. Lights exploded in my vision, and everything went black for a moment. Then I was laying on my back, blinking blood out of my eyes, my ears full of toneless ringing. I tried to suck in a breath, and immediately I regretted it. Cold like nothing I had ever felt before crammed itself into my mouth like a handful of razors, slicing its way down my throat and into my lungs. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Hot tears and blood mingled as they streamed down my face- and then froze solid to my skin. My eyes felt like they would explode from my skull. I couldn’t breathe. It was just so damned cold.
Barbas planted a foot against me and pushed, hard. I tumbled away from him, crushing corpses beneath me, rolling several times before I came to stop facedown, my rapidly freezing face pressed against a dead man’s solid chest. I struggled weakly, but it was no use. The cold was too great. It was unstoppable. All I could do was flop uselessly against the pile of frozen bodies as Barbas seized the Fabricator in his impossibly strong hands and tore it away, ripping off part of my armor’s back plate in the process. Fresh, new cold stabbed into me, and my stomach heaved with the pain. Blood and bile filled my mouth and froze. This was it. I was really dying. I sobbed, but no tears came. My mind was grinding to a halt beneath the suffocating weight of the horrible cold. I wondered if it would be warm where I was going. Fire and brimstone didn’t honestly seem all that bad right about now. The tigress welled up in me, screaming defiance against the pain, but even that surge of rage only lasted for a moment, drained away by the cold as surely as a candle flame in a blizzard. Darkness and cold crushed me down, and I stopped feeling anything at all. Something vast, darker than even this grave beneath the glacier, spread wings as broad as galaxies, stretching them wide to embrace me. And then… there was nothing.
Chapter Twelve: The Skin of a God
Volistad
Ravanur, the great mother, was dead- just as she had always been. Her outer skin, her burial shroud, and her sarcophagus had been cracked and riven. Interlopers had crawled inside to find her body. I was one of them, descending into the very bowels of the worldwide glacier with Thukkar, a gravely wounded warrior and my sister, Nissikul, a newly one-armed Stormcaller priest. I hadn't fared much better than they had in all this- I had been killed once already. We were hardly the heroes from the old stories. We didn't descend into the darkness beneath the skin of the world full of holy fire and bearing powerful talismans. Nonetheless, we went down, carried by my sister's strange magicks. We had to, in order to save the world. And to save the world, we had to save a god.
Nissikul brought the chunk of ice we had been riding to a gentle stop. The magicked black ice legs she had conjured from its flanks, spread wide to grip the edges of the narrow crevice around us. I peered over the edge and felt my breath caught in my throat. There was no light here. The only illumination I could detect was a faint, indistinct gloaming surrounding us, most likely the side effect of Nissikul's unnatural powers. I fished in the pouches at my waist and produced a glowstone. The little rock was a geode, a crystalline core surrounded by ordinary stone. That crystal, when crushed into shards, would glow very brightly. I would be able to see, but anything that lived down there might see me as well. It was a trade I wasn't sure I wanted to make. I waited, weighing the rock in my hand, but the decision wasn't one, not really. If I didn't go down there, my people would be doomed. I was a ranger, of the Erin-Vulur, and I would die before I failed to defend my own out of simple fear.
I began to check over my gear, quickly, checking the status of my bowstring, the sharpness of my arrowheads and short spears, the balance of my greathammer. Everything was in good condition, of course. My weapons had been gifts from the Deepseeker, my people's shaman of all magicks found below the ice. He could make the works of the Ravanur and the ancient gods work for him. He had made me a full complement of ranger's killing tools- every piece was a masterwork made from light, seemingly indestructible steel. My armor was likewise a wonder of deep magick- fashioned in large part, from a crystal I had never seen before. I was as prepared as I could be, and I had the Deepseeker to thank for it. That made it all the much harder for me to consider the possibility of killing him. Was he corrupted? How could I know?
Thukkar put a gloved hand on my shoulder, likely interpreting my weapon checking ritual as hesitation. Wasn’t it, though? I didn’t want to go down there. I placed the helm the Deepseeker had given me upon my head. Who knows what- With little warning and even less sympathy, my sister planted one foot against my back, and unceremoniously shoved me out over the edge of the suspended platform. "Good luck," she called as I tumbled into the darkness. "If you die down there, I'll kill you." And then I couldn't see her anymore, couldn't hear her voice. All I could hear was the rushing of cold air past my ears, and all I could see was the darkness.
I twisted in the air and crushed the glowstone in my fist, then tossed out the shards in a wide arc around me. For a moment, everything around me was illuminated in greenish fluorescence, and hard shadows rose up from beneath me. They were strange, rectangular shapes, as perfect and undamaged as they were unnatural. They stretched up to reach me like crude fingers, extending from the grubby shadows of the stone below. The twinkling shards began to wane quickly; their luminescence was weakened by their scattering. Just as the last glow faded, I saw a flash of movement, but the light faded and was gone. I hit the ground, hard, but I was prepared for the impact and took it well. I let my legs give and rolled back across my shoulders to come to my feet and transfer all of my momentum into the ground. I was in total darkness, but I wasn't alone.
Without waiting to be ambushed from behind, I slipped the greathammer from its carrying loop on my back and took a ready stance. My people had never come down this far. I was the first to set foot on the naked stone of the Great Mother, the dead god Ravanur. But even dead gods could dream, and she wasn't the only one of those down here in the dark. I heard scrabbling claws on the stone a few paces behind, and at that moment, I felt a strange relief. For the last several days I had been working to fight an evil that I couldn't see. I was struggling against a corruption I couldn't understand and one that I couldn't harm directly. I wasn't an expert on the ethereal side of the world. I listened to the priests, I made my prayers and sacrifices, and I went about my life as a ranger. My life was one of the claw, the bow, the hammer, and I hated being out of my depth. So as the thing crouching in the darkness leaped for my back, I stepped neatly aside and smashed it to the stone with a smile on my face. I couldn't see my assailant, but I heard its chattering scream as it died, and felt the crunch of pulverized bone travel up through the haft of my greathammer. This was the kind of fight I was made for, and the scuffling, chittering racket that arose from out in the blackness told me that it wasn’t over yet. Good.
I set my feet in a solid stance and swung my hammer up onto my shoulder, into the ready position. Then I closed my eyes- they wouldn’t help me here- and focused on what I could hear and smell. I was Erinye, of the Erin-Vulur, and we were the predators here. I could sense them all, each twitching, bulbous rodent body quivering with anticipation, each of them preparing to pounce. They reeked of mildew and animal musk, and I could hear their claws skittering on the stone as they twitched and danced. They never seemed to be still, and beneath their foul moldy stink, I could sense something fouler- an acrid chemical edge underneath it all, like one of the Deepseeker's blessings. It made the most sense for me to wait for them here, to let th
em come to me, let them lunge into the arc of my hammer and die. But something didn't seem right about this. The creatures I sensed were drooling with desire to attack and devour me, and yet they still waited as if held on a leash, close enough that I could smell them- and they were impossible to ignore.
I understood what was happening almost too late. I dodged to the side, a loud mechanical clicking clattering in my ear, and a blade scraped along my back, the thrusting tip foiled by my crystalline armor. Falling back on instinct, I turned my dodge into the footwork for a heavy sideways strike, and I caught my attacker before it could fully withdraw. The hammer's head hit home with an echoing clang, and my attacker reeled away from me. It was too difficult to follow its movements. I couldn't smell it at all, especially not beneath the pervading stench of the rodents still waiting all around me. It made very little noise, and only a strange, rapid clicking noise given off when it struck, allowed me to avoid being spitted for the second time. I knew my armor could deflect massive force, and turn the point of a blade or arrow, but a properly placed blow could kill me just the same. The way this thing was moving, I was sure that it could see in the dark. I couldn't let this fight go on this way; otherwise I was going to lose. I needed a plan, and I needed it very, very soon.
…
Joanna
Once again, I opened my eyes in another world, unfettered by pain, injury, or the bulk of my powered armor. The sky was white as blank paper, featureless and empty. Beneath my feet, sky poured down into the ground without any discernible boundary to separate the two. "If I'm dead," I said to no one in particular, "then the afterlife is really boring." Then it hit me, for real this time. My friend, Barbas, had killed me- or at least he had managed a fair approximation of killing me. Maybe these were my last moments, and my imagination, grown fat on the overstimulation of artificially constructed dreams, was trying to create a place for me to escape to in death. If that was the case, I thought, my imagination could really do a lot better.
The bland white of the world around me shifted subtly, and for the first time since I had opened my eyes in that place, I could see the horizon, a place where the sky seemed just a little bluer, the ground just a little greener. It was hard to tell since a soft white light seemed to suffuse the whole world, but I thought I could see something bright out there on the horizon, too bright to look at directly. From the center of that light, I could just barely make out the distant shape of a person walking briskly towards me. I fixed my gaze on that distant approaching figure, afraid that if I blinked, she would be gone, and I would be alone here again. I frowned. Why did I think the silhouette out there was female? She was too far for me even to make out the general details of her figure, but I knew she was, and I couldn't have told why.
I could do little but wait for her to approach. So I waited, staring out to the horizon and watching the little figure get closer and closer, one step at a time. Details slowly came into resolution. Her hair was white like Barbas' had been, though hers was long enough for her silky platinum braid to sweep past her hips every time she moved. Her features were broad and strange, and she looked as if someone had taken a cat's skull and roughly shaped it to resemble a human's. She looked like she might have been Volistad's more feral cousin, though she didn't wear the collection of furs and shawls that seemed to be the standard fashion for the Erin-Vulur. Instead, her clothing was styled more like something I might have seen back on Earth, in the Pan-American Dominion. She wore a close-fitting jumpsuit which emphasized her willowy, slender frame, and over it, she wore something that might have been a half-cape, or a shoulder cloak. All of her clothing was as white as her hair and was made of material I couldn't identify. It seemed as soft and delicate as satin, yet it was thick as leather and despite being white, it drew in the strange directionless light around it. The result was beautiful and frightening, intriguing and terrible. She walked like a crystalline angel of death, surrounded by her penumbra as the light was devoured around her. Before I knew it, she stood before me, close enough that I could see the subtle flecks of cobalt ringed deep within her abyssal eyes. "Who are you," I asked, and I realized that I wasn't afraid. I had died, and whatever happened to me here, it couldn't possibly be worse than the agony in which I had met my end.
The pale angel didn't answer, her bird's eyes just flicked about and took inscrutable observations of my face, my body, and probably things that even I didn't know. It was then that I realized I was naked, and in much the same state I had been when I had died. My skin was hard and strangely shiny. As I held up a hand to stare at it, I could see that my fingertips had turned blue. I looked down, and to my horror, I was smeared with blood, in much the same state as I must have been when Barbas had killed me. I couldn't feel any of the pain that being ripped out of my suit must have caused me, but I could see the ruin that had been visited on my skin, and it turned my stomach upside down. I felt a cold breeze against my bald scalp, and at that moment, I realized that I would never feel the weight of my hair on my head ever again. I had been bald since I joined the Former program, made surgically hairless to make the hermetic sealing process uncomplicated. Only Barbas' dream state had brought back those familiar curly black tresses, and he was gone. He had been taken from me.
The pale-haired woman seemed to be listening to the thoughts cross my mind, because it wasn't until my eyes rose back up to meet hers that she spoke. Her voice was a low, silken purr, carrying unspecified promises of passion. Or perhaps that tone was the threat of violence. Or it was both. "I am Ravanur." She rolled the ‘r' in Ravanur so that the name began with a contented purr. "You have come to my world, little monkey-girl, and your coming has very nearly destroyed everything I died to protect."
"I didn't destroy anything! I was barely even here before this shitty little moon of yours started trying to kill me!" I took a step forward and got right up in the dead god's face. "I came here to make this place a home for over a hundred-thousand people. Now that I'm gone, they are going to get here, and they are going to die, and your people did this.”
Ravanur didn’t even blink at my anger. Instead, she reached up one slender ice-white hand and ran her fingertips down my face. I flinched away, and she didn’t move her hand to follow me. “Monkey-child, you’re not dead. And this is about something bigger than you, your hundred-thousand doomed souls, or my people. This is not a moon. It is not a home.”
"Then what in the hell is it?”
“This is a prison, monkey-child.” Ravanur smiled, and her fangs gleamed in the false light of the dream. Much like it had been for Volistad, the expression was not one of mirth. Rather, it conveyed a distinct and unmistakable threat. “And I am its warden.”
“And… the thing that took Barbas. Was that one of your prisoners?”
Ravanur curled her lip. “The thing that took your whispering spirit away from you was the littlest of my inmates. The littlest and the least. And yet it is still enough to bring this whole place to ruin.” Her expression turned grim. “The blight it unleashes will sweep over all life in this arm of the galaxy. And because your spirit was taken, they will first find their way to your home.”
“Earth is not my home. Not anymore, and not for a long time.”
Ravanur shrugged. "Even so. It is the place of your birth and the heart of your people. And it will be destroyed, and all within consumed in the same doom that has already made barren so much of the universe." She gave me an Erin-Vulur smile with her eyes. "Of course, of more immediate concern might be your own fate in all this."
I scoffed. “I’m dead, or hadn’t you noticed all this?” I gestured to my frozen, tattered body, and the blood smeared across my skin. “It’s already over. I’m not sure why you even bothered to see me.”
Ravanur laughed out loud, producing the same sort of coughing jaguar's roar that I had heard so many days before from Volistad. "Monkey child, I told you that you are not dead."
I raised one hairless brow. “I seem pretty dead from where I’m standing.” I frowne
d. “And aren’t you?”
Ravanur nodded simply. “I am quite dead. It was necessary for the sealing of this prison. The dead are eternal. Ageless. Beyond mortality and the corruption it implies.” She pointed at me. “But you are not dead. Not yet. You still have a chance to change all of this, if you are willing to sacrifice. You will live. Your home world will be safe. And you may even be able to shepherd the hundred-thousand you speak of, perhaps show them how to make a life in this place. The people of this world are thin on the ground now. You could save the Erin-Vulur from the slow death that creeps towards them.”
“Considering how hard they tried to kill me, I feel somewhat less than motivated by that,” I said sardonically. I frowned. “Though you are one of their gods. And you said I have almost destroyed all of this.” It hit me, all at once. Though I had thought that that time was past, fear flooded my veins like cold fire. I looked up at Ravanur’s face with my heart in my throat. “It was you, wasn’t it? You told them to kill me.” I took a step back, terror rising in me. The Erin-Vulur revered her as a god, though she seemed to be something else, something more than a simple tribal deity. I didn’t know what she was capable of, but if the rest of my time on Chalice had taught me anything, it was that I should always assume the worst. “Why haven’t you killed me now? I know you can do it, dead or not dead.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 49
