“Joanna?” Barbas’ voice came in too softly, muffled as if behind a thick wall. “Joanna, the gun- I’m in the gun.” At least he was loud enough that I didn’t mistake his voice for my own thoughts again.
Gun? I thought. What gun? I looked around wildly, realizing for the first time that I seemed to have fallen into another pocket of wreckage that had collected within the glacier. Parts of my tower lay scattered in random ruin, wedged into chunks of ice and scattered all around the little pocket cavern I had fallen into. Perched high up in a tangle of cables and girders was the familiar shape of the gauss rifle turret I had put in the tower for self-defense. Too bad I hadn’t planned for a “massive native invasion, with wizards” when I had put that thing up. “I see you,” I called, not sure if Barbas could actually hear me. If he wasn’t in my head, then he might not be able to hear my thoughts. Hell, he had probably only been able to see me through the targeting sensors on the gun itself. I guessed that he was transmitting messages at me wide-band, and hoping that I would hear them.
I scrambled up the ramshackle pile of rubble, using my armor’s superhuman strength to make leaps and gaps I would never have managed without it. The rubble shifted unevenly beneath my weight, but I rode out the tremors and kept climbing, pulling myself up through a bird’s nest of cables and wires until I reached the gun. I popped open the control box quickly, not even bothering with the latch, just tearing the little hatch off of the back of the weapon to reveal the switches and ports hidden within. I took a quick look at them, frowning, then spotted the loose connection inside it and plugged it in. The gun powered up completely, and then began displaying a low battery warning. We didn’t have a lot of time. “Barbas?” I called, urgently. “Barbas! Can you hear me?”
There was a sensation of someone reading over my shoulder, a sort of itch on the back of my head. And then I felt his presence in my mind, so warm, so comforting. I had started to take the feeling for granted, and just that short time without my Qarin in my head had been one of the loneliest times in my life. It was strange what you could get used to. “I’m… here…” Barbas said, slowly, his voice strangely toneless, without any emotion at all. “You already… uploaded…”
“Are you okay?” This didn’t sound like my Barbas at all. He seemed… lesser, somehow. “Barbas, are you alright?” A creeping prickle of dread ran its way up my spine. Could Barbas be somehow crippled?
“Not… quite.” He managed a chuckle, though it sounded tinny, as though it had been processed through a primitive soundboard. “I was… busy… when the Tower… fell. There… are pieces…” He faded out suddenly, his voice dipping low, as if someone was playing with the sound quality. Before I could say anything, though, he was back, and a bit more humanity crept back into his voice. “There are pieces of me scattered all about…” his voice turned to an incomprehensible babble, before returning to Pan Standard. “I’m scattered to all of the machines I was controlling when we were attacked.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure what that means, ‘Bas. Are you saying you’re… damaged somehow?”
“Yes. No. Not damaged… not whole. I need you… need you to find the parts of me and… connect so that I can collect them… return to myself again.” Some of the humanity leaked out of his words again, turning them tinny and modulated.
“What were you networked to? Do you remember?”
“No,” he replied, returning to himself a little bit, a little warmth coming back into his voice. “Transmit… transmitting on wide-band. Probably. Find signal… find me.”
“I can do that, ‘Bas,” I whispered. “You already saved me. It’s time for me to save you.” Barbas didn’t answer. I disconnected from the railgun, partially wishing I could find a way to take the heavy weapon with me as insurance against any other burug. I jumped down from the gun, landing amidst the ice and the burug goop in a shattering crash. I realized all of a sudden that the suit alarms were beeping at me again, and I brought up the status screen for my power armor. The breaches. Right. I keyed the fabricator to repair my suit, and then found myself a shadowy spot beneath some scrap metal to sit down while the little buggers worked. It had been a long, shitty day, I needed some sleep. Chances were, tomorrow would be even worse.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Volistad
The Secrets Beneath
Down I climbed- down into darkness. My arms ached, my chest burned, my back was a mass of sore cramps and my neck had developed a kink in it that I couldn’t have knocked out of it with a mallet. And still I climbed down, one ax after another, down the strange, curiously regular shaft in the ice that had once been Joanna’s mighty tower. I couldn’t even see the top of the shaft anymore, though that may have had more to do with the lack of light down here than anything else. The skies above Ravanur were murky at best, black as the hearts of the fallen gods at the worst. So I descended, each ax set carefully, the ornate claws set into my new armored boots wedged into any toehold I could find. Descending was harder than climbing- since I was no longer fighting Ravanur’s call. The intention was for me to descend, and she wanted me to descend. But if I fell the way she wanted, I would die in one sudden, violent moment. I had to control it- and the effort of doing so, had begun to hurt before I was even seven strikes down the icy wall. At strike number three-hundred, the pain had become an old, fast friend, and I had grown used to it. It didn’t make the movements I kept repeating any easier, but I didn’t let go of the axes and fall to my death either.
The walls of the shaft were slick and smooth, the glossy freshness of ice formed right after a sudden melt. I wondered what could be so hot as to burn this far down through a glacier, but the fact that such a thing existed hardly surprised me. After all, before Joanna, I had never seen anyone but a Stormcaller bring the winds and the lightning, and she had made a storm few of their kind could match- with no sign of the usual madness that typically accompanied those powers. Wedged into the ice at occasional intervals were shards of metal, most of them smaller than my hand, but a few of them large enough for several rangers to sit shoulder to shoulder. It was on one such fragment of wreckage that I stopped to rest, lying down flat on the metal, breathing hard, my shoulders afire. My axes slipped from nerveless fingers to clatter onto the broad, jagged edged plate of divine steel, and for a time I just lay on my back and breathed, letting the burning, stabbing tension of continuous exercise leak out of my muscles.
After a few moments, when my heartbeat and breathing became slower and steadier, I secured my axes at my belt and turned over onto my hands and knees, then crawled forward to peer over the edge of my broken metal perch. All I could see below me was more endless darkness, as well as the vague suggestion of icy walls in the occasional glimmer of some dim gloaming on fresh slickness. Returning to a sitting position, I dug a glowstone out of my pack and cracked it hard against the metal, causing the fragments to burst into greenish-white light. Working quickly, I cut a chunk of ice from the wall behind me, and then shoved the brightest chunk of glowstone into it. I returned to the edge of the metal and dropped the shining chunk of ice into the darkness. The glow fell, shining on smooth, freshly frozen walls until… there. For a moment I could see it, the bottom of the shaft, splitting into dozens of irregular openings, some of them narrow and jagged, some of them rounded and wide. It was as I had suspected. The shaft had hit a nexus of other passages through the upper layers of the glacier. The tower Joanna had built was enormous, and unless it had turned to smoke like something out of the old stories, its fall should have meant an incredible amount of rubble and wreckage. Every inch of the structure had been made of hard steel, like the scrap of it I was currently sitting on- but there was a relatively little of it on the surface. Though there was enough scrap on the surface for my people to begin scavenging it, there wasn’t nearly enough to fit the great monolith I had seen rising into the sky, the heart of its own great storm. This meant most of it had to be below.
I picked another bright piece of glowstone and flic
ked it down towards one of the openings I had seen in the nexus of tunnels, natural or otherwise. For a moment I saw it, an open tunnel mouth, round and wide. The surface of the tunnel floor was mostly smooth, except for twin lines of seemingly random scratches and gouges that flanked a smooth trail of ice down into the blackness. It was a burug tunnel, which was strange because to produce a shaft like that, the burug would have had to be coming straight up at Joanna’s camp. There was no sign of it now, but the first thing that crossed my mind was Joanna’s “goss reyfel”, and the burug she had so casually killed while I had been staying with her. What if something about the tower had drawn the burug toward her? What if the one she had shot hadn’t been there by coincidence? Could Joanna kill an adult burug herself, without her goss reyfel? Not much could stop an adult burug, save for an expertly targeted and timed surprise attack from above. I thought about what one of those monsters could do to a person Joanna’s size and shuddered. I remembered seeing just that when I was a boy, when the grim rangers had returned what was left of my mother and father wrapped up together in a single, soaked cloak so that Nissi and I could do our duty as children and give them to the fire. Joanna might be armored and unbelievably strong, but she could die, just the same as me. Everyone died, even gods.
I rose and my blood was suddenly surging with energy. It was time to move. I still had a long way to go. I made my way off of my temporary respite, setting my axes carefully and finding toeholds with my clawed boots. I descended again, this time, more quickly, energized by old memories of pain and rage, and before long, I found myself perched on the edge of one of the rounder, wider tunnels, looking down along its gentle, slick slopes. I took a long breath, checking for the telltale whiff of the pungent burug stink. Instead of the strange, heady flavor of burug musk, I smelled death. Corpses, frozen and still fresh. They smelled metallic, like the taste of copper wires held under the tongue. Blood, still frozen, not dried or eaten by scavengers. People had died in the tower’s fall, I knew that, but smelling it here was somehow worse. The smell assaulted my nose, my eyes, and instead of just knowing with my mind, now I knew that some of my comrades had died in a more personal way. I knew it in my heart, in my stomach, in the bile at the back of my throat. All of them dead to the Elders’ misguided crusade. I tried to remind myself that they had been tainted by the fallen Dark Ones, that their minds were not their own, but the lingering ache in my chest and the sick taste in the back of my mouth told me otherwise. Whatever the reason, the Elders had betrayed the Erin-Vulur, and when I found Joanna, we would make sure they answered for what they had done. Starting with Elder Lot. Maybe I would drive a spear through his back, see how he liked it, the treacherous-
“H-help.” A voice echoed in the darkness, barely strong enough for me to hear. Immediately I snapped back to the present, to where I was, to who I was, and I was ashamed. I was a ranger first, even if I had been cast out, and one of the things that a ranger did was search for the wounded in times of disaster. I was here for Joanna, but I couldn’t forget who I was. If I had been paying closer attention instead of imagining eviscerating the Elders, I might have smelled the faint tang of sweat and fresh vomit, which would have told me that there was at least one living survivor. I grimaced and sniffed again, letting my hunter’s instincts tell me where the stink was coming from. There. To my right. I turned and prowled the nexus of tunnels, stopping at each strange shaft until I found the one from which the smell came most strongly. As if to confirm I was in the right place, the survivor managed to wheeze, “help” again, this time accompanied by a rattling breath that sounded like it was being drawn through lungs half full of water. There was no time to lose.
I twisted and dropped off the edge of the ice and into the tunnel, driving in both of my axes halfway, so that instead of stopping me short, they merely slowed me. I ground twin trails into the ice all the way down, and as I reached the bottom, I freed one ax and cast the remainder of the glowstone gravel out away from me in an arc. The scene was lit in stark detail, everything standing out and emphasized by the sharp shadows cast by the greenish-white light. I was standing at the bottom of another curiously smooth tunnel, this one strange and angular. I realized the reason for that shape almost immediately. A warped, scored sheet of metal that fit the exact dimensions of the passage filled the nominal “floor”. Piled atop it was a mess of fused, tangled scrap from Joanna’s tower, and leaning against it.... A man surrounded by smears of blood and flanked by two other crumpled forms. I stowed my axes and crossed over to him quickly, the smell of blood and vomit was thick in my nostrils.
“Hello,” the man sighed, his voice little more than a whisper, dry as vellum. “I didn’t think anyone was coming.”
“No one was,” I replied, and reached out slowly to touch his neck, feel for his pulse. I moved slowly, deliberately, so as not to startle him. I couldn’t really see his eyes in order to check for sure, but I was certain that he was in shock. My people could be very dangerous when badly injured, because our instincts tended to take over at unexpected times. He let me touch his neck, though, and the pulse I felt was steady, if a little weak. He took a long breath, his chest rattling wetly again, and I winced. That sounded like a punctured lung, slowly filling with blood. “What happened here?”
The ranger laughed and the sound tinged with a dangerous mania. I didn’t move, I just watched him bare his fangs and cackle for a long minute before he said, “Volistad, right?”
“Yes,” I said simply, waiting for the inevitable accusation. I should be dead; I was taken by the Dark Ones. I was a traitor- whatever Elder Lot had told my people.
But the wounded man only shook his head spasmodically and croaked out another dismal laugh. “It’s good to see that you’re alive, Vah, though I wish someone had told your sister that.”
I recognized him then, something about the way the man had called me “Vah”, after the first letter in my name. It was something about the way his jaw had moved, the way his lips had shaped the words around his fangs. Though his features were hard to determine in the sickly light of the glowstone fragments, I knew him. “Thukkar. Is that you?” He was an older ranger, one of the senior members of the patrol teams. He did more tunnel patrols than he did hunting expeditions, so he and I had rarely crossed paths. But I knew who he was, and he knew me. He had always been strong, fierce, and proud, and seeing him broken like this was…wrong.
“Aye, it is, Vah. Though there’s little left of me below the waist, I’m afraid.”
“What?”
Thukkar chuckled. “I can’t move, boy. I think that through the fall I broke my back. I thought I was just going to sit here until I either starved or my blessing ran out. I knew they wouldn’t send search teams down this far- not when they said… they said…” He broke off, collapsing into a fit of wheezing coughs.
“Palamun’s face,” I swore between my teeth. Then I frowned. “What was that you said about my sister?”
The ranger winced, and gave me what might have been an apologetic look, or a grimace of pain. Or perhaps it was both. “Nissikul. They… they told us you had been corrupted by the false god we came out here to kill, said that you had been killed doing her dark bidding. They said that you had tried to assassinate Elder Lot, and he had been forced to kill you.” He chuckled ruefully, then stopped, wincing again as he fought to stave off another barrage of wracking coughs. “Nissikul was furious, of course. Wouldn’t hear it when the Elder told her to stay in the village. We were all prepared for the attack, and she just appeared, told us she was going into that storm to kill the god who killed you, and just went in.”
“She what?”
“Oh, that’s the best part. Lot and his little acolytes couldn’t get through the thing. They kept getting thrown back, pelted with ice. Little Nissi just walks up, tears off her furs-” He paused for a moment, as if reminiscing wistfully. I considered flicking him in the ear with one of my claws, but I thought better of it. She wasn’t his sister, after all. And besides, he was
plenty beaten up already. He shook himself out of his stupor. “Anyways, she just throws her furs to the ice and just walks into that great black stormwall like it wasn’t there. A few moments later, and the whole thing comes apart, so the Elders told us to charge.” He waved at his legs, which splayed uselessly out in front of him. “Well, you know how I was always a fast one. Me, Cetterak and Peerka…” The ranger gestured at the mangled bodies flanking him, each of them bloodied beyond recognition, skulls deformed, and limbs twisted and broken. The humor went out of his face, and the edge of something darker crept into his voice, flickered across his face. “So I’m running, and I hear Nissikul just roar, like I have never heard her do before, and I’m crossing that trench where the storm was, and all I see was her bringing down a greathammer, made of that black witch-ice the ‘Callers’ are always using, and that’s the last thing I remember before I woke up here.”
I crouched there for a moment, in shocked silence. Nissikul had done all this? With one blow? “Well, Thukkar, I’m not dead. The Deepseeker saved me. He says the Elders are corrupted, and that the god you all just tried to kill is our only hope. And I’m going down there to find her.”
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 15
