“Already there,” he replied, and I heard the whine of the great gauss rifle emplacement spinning up its acceleration chambers.
I swore under my breath. I had thought things were going well with Volistad. Surely his people couldn’t have disregarded all the progress we had made, could they? I stepped forward, fumbling my Erin-Vulur vocabulary amidst the sudden thundering of my heart. “Listen, I am not your enemy! We don’t have to fight! I don’t want to hurt anyone! We all just-” I stopped when I saw the Stormcaller’s expression. She was taller than the first one had been, of a height with Volistad. Her face would have been beautiful, filled with youth and vibrant life. But her face was twisted in a mask of fury and grief that was unmistakable, despite our differing species. Her eyes, completely black orbs, ran with tears that froze in long streams down her face and formed icicles from her chin. She was naked as she emerged from the storm wall, but the same icy plate armor I had seen before, was growing up to encase her slender body. “I’m a friend!” I couldn’t give up on this. I didn’t want a war, and though I had powerful technology at my disposal, the power demonstrated by the Stormcallers was something I wasn’t prepared to fight. “I’m a friend of Ranger Volistad!”
At the mention of the name, the Stormcaller threw back her head and roared, an animal sound like that of a great cat in pain. The sound was terrific, louder even than the storm, and I just stood there before her as she screamed. I was transfixed by something primal within me, something that knew that sound and was afraid. Barbas was shouting something about multiple targets, but I couldn't respond. I staggered before that roar, scrabbling at my waist for my gun. The Stormcaller made a flexing motion with her clawed hands, and black ice gathered about her fingertips, sheathing her own claws and growing into curved, six-inch talons. The gauss rifle chirped, but the enraged woman preparing to tear me to shreds seemed to be prepared for my weapons. She darted forward in the split instant before the rifle fired, lunged out of the shattering ice for me, claws extended toward my face. She hit me, hard, and I tripped over my newly minted mining drone, tumbling over backward and rolling to my feet too slow. The Stormcaller screamed and slashed one razor hand at my face. I barely interposed my arm between the claws and my quartz faceplate. There was a shriek as the strange, empowered ice clove great furrows in the surface of my armor. I managed to lift one foot and deliver a stomping kick to the Stormcaller's stomach, sending her tumbling back several meters across the ice. She got to her feet unsteadily, clearly dazed by the force of the blow. Even stunned, though, her reflexes bordered on precognition. She twitched hard to the side, just as the gauss rifle fired again with a muffled bark, and the ice a meter behind her exploded up from the ground in a mess of shards. A helm, crowned with icy spikes, was forming around her face, and all I could see of her were those empty, furious eyes, and a mouth lined with fangs.
“Why are you doing this?!” I pleaded in my broken, halting Erin-Vulur, finally managing to get my gun free of its holster and powering up its own acceleration chamber with a telltale whine. “I didn’t come here to fight you! I didn’t come here to hurt anyone! Ask Volistad!”
The beginnings of a growl crackled in the Stormcaller’s throat, and she flicked her fingers, sending the black claws skittering away. A monstrous black great hammer emerged from the ice a moment later, rising towards her waiting hand with an ominous creaking sound. “Don’t,” she seethed her voice raw, riven with obvious grief and rage. “Don’t speak his name.” She began to advance, slowly, a slight limp in her step. I noticed that her armor was webbed with white, glowing cracks where I had kicked her. “You who killed him. You who killed my brother." She raised the hammer over her head, spitting out her words like they were poison darts. "Keep your peace, false god. You stand before Stormcaller Nissikul of the Erin-Vulur, chosen of Palamun! Die in silence!”
Several things happened at once. My storm wall tore itself apart, with a cascading blast of sound that more resembled the detonation of a thermobaric bomb than anything resembling thunder. Hundreds of people became visible around the perimeter of my camp, all of them yelling with battle-rage, already hurling black spears towards me and my tower. At the same time, a solid barrier of metal and ice shot up from the ground on a tide of fabricator nanites, surrounding me in a thick, egg-shaped pod. Nissikul's hammer fell, glowing like a meteor, and, instead of striking me, it glanced off of my shield construct and continued down into the ice, discharging its terrible energy into the glacier beneath our feet. I never knew if the reactor exploding was something Barbas did, or if something the enraged tribes people had unleashed to destroy me, had destabilized the fusion core in its cradle under the ground. Either way, the whole world shook beneath my feet, and for a moment, everything bounced several meters into the air. Then we all fell back down, and there was no longer hard ice waiting to receive us. I fell, the Terraforming Engine fell, Nissikul and several of the most enthusiastic of the Erin-Vulur fell, all of us plummeting into darkness and smashing into each other and huge boulders of tumbling ice.
I crashed into something hard, so hard that I almost passed out. I slid along a tilted slope of ice, and I couldn't even see where I was, much less control my momentum, especially not with everything I had been working to build for the past month crashing down around me in a rain of shattered metal. I rolled and ground my armored feet into the ice, scrabbling frantically for purchase, anything that could stop me sliding down into certain death. My feet slid out from under me, and I frantically dug my hands into the ice, clawing desperately as my legs slid over a sharp ledge. Cracks in a glacier can descend for miles. If you go down into that darkness, you will never come out, a voice in my mind told me, and I knew it to be true. I was going to die on this shithole moon after all. “BARBAS!!!” I screamed frantically, tears running down my face only to be sponged away by my suit’s automatic environment maintenance system. There was no answer from the AI, from my Qarin. I was alone, and I was going to die.
I lost my grip suddenly, without warning, as the ice beneath my fingers cracked and gave in. I fell into the darkness, and the abyss reached up to swallow me whole.
Chapter Twenty
Volistad
In the Dark
I woke up, which was surprising. I felt like I had been beaten to death, which was less so. For some time I just lay there, on my back in the dark, feeling the pain. It was something I had done before, a couple times. The aftermath of my initiation into the rangers had felt something like this. My body felt swollen, like even my bruises had bruises, and I couldn’t move. What made this time different was the sharp, mind-erasing pain that shot through my back and chest every time I took a breath. I would hold off for as long as I could, just lying there, not breathing, until my lungs burned. Then I would take a breath and a shaft of burning cold, a spear of frozen fire, would slice through me in agony, and I would forget where I was for a moment. Then I would remember, and the cycle would start all over again. I wondered why I was alive. I wondered what they had told my sister. Even if I wasn’t actually dead, I was as good as a corpse to the tribe. I had just lost my home, and my family, and for what? It hurt, but I let myself cry. There was no one around to see, no point in holding it back. No one cared if a dead ranger wept.
Sometime later, an outline of flickering light appeared in some distance away from me, in the dark. It was a door opening, spilling a little of the light beyond, into the dark of my tomb. I couldn’t move my head to look around, but the ceiling of this dark space, whatever it was, was a tangle of metal tubes. They twisted and looked like vines, each one of a different color, each one marked with symbols I did not understand. Footsteps approached me, slow, and uneven, and a moment later, a weather-beaten, slightly unhinged-looking old man’s face, appeared above mine. I recognized him immediately. He was the Deepseeker. I didn’t know his name- no one did- but he was a long-standing fixture of the tribe, the only Elder of his office that anyone living could remember filling the role. His job was to seek out secrets hid
den far below the glacier that covered all the world, and find things that my people could use to survive. We needed all the help we could get in order to survive the harsh cold of the Mother, Ravanur. “Elder,” I spoke, despite the pain required to breathe. “Where am I? And why am I alive?”
The Deepseeker’s expression was unreadable, his wide, mad eyes flickering about behind his ridiculous set of copper-framed crystal lenses. He just stared at me for a long time, not quite meeting my eyes; his only movement was that flickering gaze. After some time, he spoke, slowly, his voice strangely lucid. “You live, ranger. Even I thought there was little chance you would recover.”
“Why?” I croaked, my throat dry as bare stone.
The Deepseeker’s lips parted, and a low, rattling laugh escaped from between his fangs. “Why did the Elder Stormcaller try to kill you? Or are you asking why I saved you?”
I didn’t have the energy to scowl at the ancient madman- and it may not have been a good idea, anyway. “Both,” I managed. I became aware of a nauseating smell, some unholy mixture of urine and corrupted oil. I wrinkled my nose. I wanted to ask what in Palamun’s name could smell like that, but I held my tongue. At least I had an excuse not to breathe as much.
The Deepseeker’s face disappeared for a moment, and I heard him somewhere off to my right, clanking around in the shadows. There was a loud crack followed by a sharp, acidic smell, and a little orb of softly glowing light appeared amidst the metal tubes above me. The Deepseeker reappeared, holding a small clay bowl. The offending ammoniac stench was immediately worse, and I gagged. The Elder didn’t react to my revulsion; instead he spooned up a measure of some tarry, foul substance from the bowl with two of his fingers. He spread the thick liquid on my chest, and immediately the aching pain emanating from my wound there dulled somewhat, and I realized I could breathe more easily. He began to spread more of the revolting mixture on other places I hadn’t even known I had been hurt. As he worked, he spoke, still in that strangely lucid voice but all the signs of his usual wild temper entirely absent from his manner. For the first time in my life, I detected a faint smile around his eyes, as if he were content with his place in life, rather than his usual melange of boredom and bitter rage. “I believe the Elder Council has been corrupted by the Dark Ones.”
Despite my wounds, despite the bad smell of the cataplasm, I felt myself grow immediately cold with fear. “What?”
“You heard me, boy”, the Deepseeker snapped and a little of his usual vitriol trickled back into his voice. “You’re injured, not stupid.”
I swallowed my initial sarcastic response and tried again. “How could this happen? Aren’t the Dark Ones trapped below the ice?”
The Deepseeker looked thoughtful for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “They are. The Dark gods that Ravanur brought down, frozen to her breast, they are still there, cold and still. But…” He met my eyes then, his eyes wide, the pupils dilated all the way, until they almost swallowed the deep brown of his irises and tried to edge into the dark sclera all around. He was somewhere between intense, bone-rattling fear, and almost orgasmic joy. His lips skinned away from his teeth, revealing all of his fangs in an expression somewhere between a mortal Erin-Vulur threat and one of Joanna’s toothy smiles. He leaned in close to me, and I could feel his hot breath on my pallid face. I could smell the sickly-sweet edge of rot emanating from deep in his throat. The next words he spoke seemed to hang in the air in front of me, shimmering with all the encapsulated madness that had boiled the mind of this old shaman into a soupy morass. “Even dead gods dream.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Volistad
In the Dark
I stayed there in the strange room, surrounded by the detritus of all the ancient magicks that were the heart and soul of the Deepseeker’s craft, for three more days. The old master used blessing after blessing on me, a different one each time. Some of them were complicated devices of glass and steel, finer than anything I had ever seen before. They were spitting burning fluids into my body through great hollow needles that the Elder stabbed into my arms and legs with little consideration for the pain they brought with them. Others were simple cuffs or gauntlets, like the blessings I had worn so many times before above the surface, to protect me from the cold. One particularly memorable blessing came in the form of a single black capsule that the Elder forced me to swallow. It gave off such a sense of danger to my instincts that I couldn’t make myself take the evil thing into my mouth. But the Deepseeker, not discouraged, simply forced my jaws open with a surprising strength in his ancient, wiry frame, and forced the black blessing down my throat. I spent that night in terrible agony, my heart feeling like it was being slowly eaten by a thousand burrowing insects and replaced with something cold and dead. When I woke up the next morning, I found that the wound in my chest was completely closed, leaving behind only a dark scar on my pale skin. I could move again, and for the first time, I got up from the hard cot I had been lying on and walked around, feeling strangely strong and self-assured. Surely I could not be fully recovered. I had been utterly run through, with a spear of enchanted ice no less, and I should be dead, not walking around feeling like I could kick down a solid wall of stone. When the Deepseeker visited me the next time, he didn’t bring any other blessing. He just brought me a set of clothes and boots, similar to my ranger’s hides. He told me to get dressed and meet him outside the room for a real meal. I remembered then that I hadn’t eaten nothing more than a thin broth since before I had been nearly killed. My body was more than willing to show me just how hungry it was.
I dressed quickly and left the narrow, cramped space that had been my sickbed, ducking through a door hung with a dark fabric I didn’t recognize. It was marked with the same incomprehensible sigils as all of the Deepseeker’s work, and I wondered if the perfect square of dark cloth carried some other purpose besides acting as a door. After all, if the Elder felt the need to mark it, perhaps it carried a secondary, greater purpose, like all of his blessings. Dismissing my trivial speculations, the smell of food suddenly caught my attention. Specifically, it was that of roasting meat, coming from somewhere just ahead, down the long corridor I was standing in. I followed my nose, negotiating carefully around large, uneven shapes covered by thin woolen sheets until I found another door. A sheet of some strange, hard substance hung there and it was astonishingly light. It rattled as I pushed it aside, folding awkwardly ahead of me until I slipped through the door and let it fall back into place behind me. A heavy steel table stood in the center of a large room, piled high with food, mostly varieties of meat. I recognized burug fillets and vulyak steaks, and well as cuts of meat I didn’t recognize, perhaps coming from some unknown forms of life that frequented the deeper, darker places beneath the glacial skin of Ravanur.
Without stopping to wonder whether I was meant to eat from this fabulous bounty, I strode over to the table purposefully, barely slowing to snatch a steel stool from a place near the wall. I really should have marveled a little more at the room’s furnishings, which were all solid steel. They were obviously made of such a good quality that even the village’s best smith looked like an apprentice. However, my stomach was roaring, and I could feel an anticipatory growl starting up at the base of my throat. I sat down to the feast of perfectly roasted meat and tore into it. Any pretense of good behavior was forgotten as I ripped my way through the varieties of delicious food piled across the table. I’m not sure when the Deepseeker came into the room. I was just slurping out a section of burug mandible when I looked up and found him just sitting there, on a stool like mine, directly across from my place at the table. For a split second, I felt my lips peel back and bare my fangs, and I felt the beginnings of a growl stirring in my throat as I locked my glare on the older, weaker man. I caught myself and shook my head, blinking the predator stare away, realizing just how hungry I had been. It had been a long time since I had gone feral like that. Managing to pull together enough presence of mind to swallow the chunk of me
at I had had in my mouth, I grunted out a short, “Hello Elder.”
If the Deepseeker felt at all offended by my rudeness, he didn’t show it. “Good. Your appetite has returned. You should know that you will need to eat more than you have before, to feed the blessings I placed in your body.”
I stopped, dropping the empty mandible and fixing my full attention onto the elder. “Inside me?”
The Deepseeker smiled with his eyes, the very tips of his fangs appeared between his cracked old lips in a dangerous counterpoint. “Yes, ranger. While you slept, I placed some of my strongest magicks within your flesh. You will no longer require any other blessings to survive the hard cold of Ravanur, though you will need to eat almost twice as much as before to keep your new heart running.” I just sat there, gaping at him with wide eyes, my hands unconsciously clutching at my chest where my heart was, just to the left of the thick, ropy scar that marked the place I had been stabbed. The Deepseeker only laughed at my confusion and revulsion. That hideous, rattling sound raised all of the hairs on the back of my neck. “You should thank me, boy.” Some of his usual manic hate threaded its way through his words, reminding me that the old shaman was absolutely insane. He might have been a mostly functional insane, but it didn’t change the fact that something was missing behind those frenzied eyes. “I just made you the greatest ranger to ever walk the ice of Ravanur.”
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 11
