With my free hand, I seized the metal-clad thing beneath me by what seemed to be its throat. Then I jammed the spike of my climbing ax in under its nominal chin and hammered the point home with the side of my fist. It made a few feeble swipes with its blade, which was apparently attached to its arm, but I swatted them away easily. With my axe stuck fast, I stood, keeping the thing pinned with one leg. Then I bent, seized the ax handle in both hands, and I pulled as hard as I could, putting my whole body into it. For a moment I just stood there, straining, aware of the rodents gathering closer and closer in the dark as they regained their confidence. The metal man beneath me writhed and thrashed, but just as it seemed that it was regaining its wits enough to strike back, the neck gave way, and I tore the whole head away in a shower of yellow sparks. For a moment, the whole scene was illuminated in flickering lurid light, and I got a glimpse of what I had been fighting.
Beneath me lay not an Erinye-like man in metal, but rather a man made entirely of metal. It had been constructed from tubes and struts and hundreds of fine gears, mostly protected by metal plates. Some of those plates had been thoroughly dented by the strikes of my hammer. One of its arms was just a metal replica of mine, with five fingers tipped by short claws. The other arm, however, ended in a retracting blade as long as my forearm- the edge of which glimmered wetly beneath the light of the showering sparks. The false-man shuddered beneath me, spewing sparks and thick, viscous black fluid everywhere, before it finally fell still. The area fell into darkness once more. I stood, raising my axe menacingly, and let a low, threatening growl roll over my lips. The rat-things skittered around nervously in the dark, where I couldn't see them, but none of them attacked.
I slipped my hand into a pouch at my waist and found another glowstone. This one I didn't crush into powder, rather I split it in half with a careful tap against the edge of my axe. Blue light spilled out from my hand, illuminating the shuddering, twitching rat things clearly for the first time. They were hideous creatures, covered in hundreds of foul, pus-filled boils- some of which were so large as to affect their balance. There were dozens of them, but the light seemed to hurt them physically, and they backed up as I raised my fistful of piercing blue light to shine over more of them. We stood that way for some time, until, all at once, the rodents broke, shrieking en masse and scrambling away into the dark. I waited until I could hear their tortured screams no more, before I let my arm fall to my side.
That had been close. I hadn't sensed the metal man's approach, and I sure as the ice hadn't expected it. If it hadn't been for the clattering sound made by the extending blade as it struck, I would have died in its initial assault, speared through the neck before I would even have realized it was happening. Though some of my brethren possessed the Great Mother's gift of sight in the darkness, I was not so lucky, and I didn't think I would survive another fight like that. It had been far too close. I checked my pouch of glowstones. I had six, which if I used carefully, might last me a day down here in the crushing dark. I didn't have long to find Joanna. If I stayed down here after I ran out of the luminescent pebbles, I could be trapped down here forever. I knew what I needed to do, but I didn't want to do it. Nissikul was badly injured and had lost a lot of blood. And Thukkar was walking again, but only with a lot of aid. He could hardly fight, but I couldn't leave him behind either. If I called Nissikul down here, he would be coming too. She didn't want to set foot on the stone, for it was sacred to our tribe. But she could conjure up a light bright enough for us to see - one that would last as long as she willed it. I needed that talent, or all this would be for nothing. Would she even hear me, all the way up there in the bottom of the glacier, the "ceiling" of this land of darkness?
I took a deep breath to yell and stopped. I could hear something from above me, a sort of chittering, clicking sound, much like the sound of rodent claws on stone. I frowned and dropped into a guard, but just a few seconds later I was forced to abandon the stance and backpedal quickly as a great chunk of ice with flailing black arachnid legs smashed into the ground, not five spear-lengths away from me, and shattered into hundreds of pieces of hissing ice. I yelled and tried simultaneously to scramble forward and run away, but ended up falling onto my ass. "Palamun's teeth!" I screamed as I struggled to my feet. "Nissi! Thukkar! NISSI!"
"Quit shouting," murmured a weary feminine voice from just above me. I looked up and saw, to my shock, Nissikul, limned in pale blue light, drifting down at a leisurely pace, Thukkar clinging to her like his life depended on it. She touched down gently and peeled Thukkar's hands off her, leaving him shuddering and leaning hard on the iron short spear I had left him to use as a cane. With a flick of her wrist and a few muttered syllables, Nissi cast another one of her floating orbs of light into existence over her shoulder, so that it floated back there like a lantern. Registering my shock, she shrugged. "The stone is sacred, but Ravanur will forgive me. This is too important just to leave it to you. You would just mess it up."
I snorted. She might have been a Stormcaller, a terrifying avatar of the wrath of the Erinye gods, but she was still my sister. "Thanks, Nissi."
“For the record,” grumbled Thukkar, “I tried to convince her otherwise.”
“Please,” Nissi and I said at the same time. I continued, smiling with my eyes. “You can’t convince Nissikul of anything.” I sighed and bent to pick up my hammer, then stowed my weapons in their appropriate places. “Alright you two, if you’re coming, let’s go. We’ve got a god to save.”
Chapter Forty
Joanna
The Skin of a God
I woke up in darkness. This time, I was fully aware of the crushing cold and the pain that was wracking every part of my body. I could feel the frozen, crumpled metal of my suit as searing fire against my flesh, and I could barely take a breath. It felt like the air would claw open my lungs from within, ripping through me with talons of ice. But I wasn't dead. Ravanur hadn't been lying. I wasn't actually dead- and whatever she had done to me was keeping me that way for the moment. However, it wouldn't last forever. Though she was a god, albeit a dead one, she had said that her powers were limited at the scale that mortals like me operated within. She couldn't make me do anything, and she couldn't stop the planet's ferocious cold from killing me permanently. As she explained it, her powers were an order of magnitude greater than my petty needs. She could affect the movement of the local planets and moons, and could hide Chalice's true nature from outside observation. She could even bring forth an apocalyptic level of destruction to destroy any large fleet that dared threaten the security of her secret prison for deities. But against the actions of individual beings, people like me- or Barbas- she was limited to the use of empowered agents. And she intended me to be one such agent if I survived.
I scrambled free of my suit, gritting my teeth and closing my mind against the horrible pain of my wounds. I immediately began scouring the frozen bodies that lay all around me, trying to ignore their glassy vacant stares. Most of them were Erinye, like Volistad, though some showed the more feral features displayed by Ravanur. Perhaps those were older? Other bodies weren’t human at all, from something that looked like a shaggy, eight-legged horse to a colossal beast that looked like nothing so much as a monstrous hermit crab whose home was a hollowed out boulder. The whole menagerie, man and beast, were dead- and they showed no wounds. I couldn’t guess what killed them all. There was no bruising, no discoloration, just death- like they were used up soda bottles, casually tossed aside by an uncaring giant when he had finished with them. Except for the cold, and the place where Barbas’ nanite storm had eaten some of them to make his own body, they could all have been sleeping.
Remembering Ravanur's instructions, I searched frantically through the pile of frozen corpses, each one of them a minor Herculean task to move. Most of the humanoids had been dressed in the clothes they had died in, and I quickly identified one dressed as Volistad had been. The dead ranger wore assorted furs wrapped tight around his frozen corpse, and he bore
a variety of weapons and tools all about his person. I heaved the dead ranger out of the pile, and quickly stripped him of his furs, looking for the one object Ravanur had told me I needed to seek. I found it fairly easily, in the form of a heavy black torque, an ornate band meant to be worn about the upper arm. It had clearly been fashioned from the scavenged remains of some other machine, and I could see some of the ancient circuitry cunningly woven into the new design, and what looked like thermal conduction coils disguised behind little medallions of silver. All in all, it was a beautiful piece of art- but it was completely inert. Whatever power it might once have had, that energy was gone - unless I did exactly as the "Great Mother" had told me.
I lifted the black band high over my head and turned my eyes away from it, preparing for what I knew would be exceedingly painful. I felt static building in the air, lifting the preserved hair of the thousands of dead piled around me into the air in a crackling halo. The air thickened around me, and even my frozen sinuses detected the acrid stink of ozone as the whole space around me became charged with hidden electrical potential. "I can only do this for you once," Ravanur had said. "The bodies all still have tiny sparks of bioelectricity contained in their brains. Not nearly enough for cognition, but enough, in the aggregate, to charge one of that old goat's devices." I didn't know who ‘that old goat' was, but I figured that being on a nickname basis with a god, was probably more a curse than it was a blessing. Ironically, that was the situation in which I was now trapped. "Hold that trinket high, my little lightning bug." I stretched as far as I could, and held the torque high above my head, squeezing my eyes shut in preparation for…
PAIN. All I could hear was a dial tone from an old wired phone. All I could see were random patterns and spots dancing in my vision. But I could feel… EVERYTHING. A hundred-thousand frozen moments in time, indistinct flashes of sensation and emotion from thousands of suddenly shortened lives- it all surged through me, through my veins, through my heart, through my mind, and my sense of self was wiped away before the flood. I screamed as a thousand vicious pains stabbed, burned, crushed and shot their way through my body. I fell to my knees as a thousand tiny fragments of pleasure lit up my nervous system and left me shaky and weak. A kaleidoscope of moments flashed through me, riding the burning current of lightning from the bodies below, coiling up through my body and spiraling up my arm toward my spasmodic grip on the black torque. I blacked out where I was kneeling, for just a few seconds. And then it was over. I looked down at the results of the ordeal, praying to whichever god that could hear me for Ravanur to have come through for me.
In my hand lay a black metal torque, woven with wire and engraved with a hundred subtle symbols, each of them precisely fashioned. The bauble seemed much the same as it had been, though now it hummed with quiet, threatening power. All of that energy had been channeled through me into the device like it was a battery. As I slipped the metal band onto my arm and pushed it up toward my shoulder, I noted how tight it was against the muscle. Good. The suit had done its job all these months, and it had kept my muscles free of atrophy. I looked down at the band against my skin, and I frowned. All runes scrawled around it, glowed a faint blue, and I noticed with a start that I couldn't feel the cold - not entirely, anyway. I knew it was cold, and my skin confirmed that knowledge. But I no longer hurt from the cold, and I could breathe easily. I was alive. I would live- for now. I didn't know how long this device would last, and if I didn't get to the next step of Ravanur's plan before it ran out again, there would not be another "convenient" mass grave for me to use as a static charger.
Hurriedly, I pulled on the dead ranger's fur, bending and placing a palm against his hard, frozen chest and saying a silent thank you. Then I rose and made my way over to the wreck of my suit to find the key to this whole thing. I didn't know why I needed it, but Ravanur had been very insistent. I would need the heart of a burug. Fortunately, the strange black heart I had lifted from the puddle of liquefied burug was still intact and undamaged. I wasn't sure what could damage it, since I had fallen onto the thing, and my armored weight hadn’t even scratched it. I didn’t have time to ponder its strange properties, however. I had a very long way to go. I stowed the heart in the pack I took from the ranger, hefted one of his spike-headed climbing axes, and set off into the darkness. I didn’t know where Barbas had gone, but that would have to wait. He had become something of a god himself- or at least he had been consumed by one. If I wanted to defeat what remained of him- I would need to earn my own divinity first.
Chapter Forty-One
Joanna
Seeking Divinity
The world beneath the ice was dark as a tomb and cold as the ninth circle of Hell. I walked the stone carefully, my only guide the indistinct, instinctual knowledge that Ravanur had placed within my mind. I knew where to walk to reach my goal- but how far I was walking, or what I was looking for, was a mystery. All I could do was walk in the direction that "felt right," and hope that this place I was being sent to, wasn't on the other side of Chalice. I had salvaged some parts from my ruined armor, enough to jury-rig a light that wouldn't die in the cold. The makeshift lantern dangled from the back of a billhook I had salvaged from the mass grave where I had nearly died. My light cast a swaying, electric glow in a ring around me, illuminating no more than a couple of meters in any direction. The darkness down here seemed to eat the light, and even the air down here felt close and oppressive, like the abyss could force itself into my throat and suffocate me by its sheer weight. I felt woefully unprepared, trudging along the barren stone in my stolen furs, and I found myself touching the torque around my arm every couple minutes, subconsciously making sure it was still there. After all, the magic it contained was the only thing keeping me alive in this cold.
I thought on all that had happened as I walked, but no answers resolved themselves from the morass. If I had been told just a month or two ago that one of my primary concerns on this world would be fighting the dark, dead gods and terrifying magic, I would have laughed in the messenger's face. There was no such thing as magic… or was there? After everything I had seen, could I really say that? "All technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke's Third Law might have been meant for stories, but it sure as hell applied here. The image of that Stormcaller, wracked with raw grief and incandescent rage, flashed into my mind for a moment. I flinched, squeezing my eyes shut for a moment. When I opened them, I noticed that the light of my lantern was being reflected back at me from the side of what looked like a giant, smooth, building.
I approached the shadowy shape slowly, letting the circle of my light slowly crawl along it until it was fully revealed. It was a monolith of expertly shaped stone, polished to glossy smoothness, its edges sharp and perfect as they had been when it was made. I leaned in a little closer, and I could make out thousands of text lines, in a script I could not recognize. The foreign letters seemed to be comprised of various combinations of circles, arcs, and lines, and the overall effect was that of seeing a bizarre lunar phase chart. I reached out a hand and brushed the surface with my fingertips. It was not cold to my touch, as I would have expected. Instead, the stone was strangely warm, as if it hid a powerful reactor from me. Its warmth didn't seem to affect the surrounding air, which was still frigid beyond belief, but it actually felt almost hot to the touch.
I turned to leave and stopped. In the light of my lantern, I could see a faint black mist curling up off of the stone monolith, and faintly, as if from behind a thick wall, I heard several voices whispering. They weren't speaking in perfect unison, and I couldn't understand them, but the meaning still came to me as though they had spoken in Pan-American. Let us out. The whispers were sibilant, and the pitch of their pleas rose and fell seemingly at random. Let us out, Joanna. My blood turned to ice in my veins. They knew my name. I jerked my hand away from the stone, now completely certain of the purpose of that imposing stone. This was a sarcophagus for a dead dark god- though as Ravanur had suggested, it di
d not contain a particularly powerful one. Still, even this god, one of the weak ones not bound deep beneath the stone, could reach out and touch me, even imprisoned, even dead. Tendrils of black smoke snaked towards my head, and I took several steps back, making sure that they couldn't reach me. After a few meters, the tendrils collapsed, the whispers stopped, and once again, the stone was inert.
"Shit." I cursed under my breath. "Shit, how do I even begin to fight something like that? I can't just kill a ghost with an axe!" I wasn't sure I was ready to kill an Erinye with an axe either, but if I ran into any of them down here, I would have to do it. I wasn't going to be helpless again.
I moved on from the monolith, raising my light over my head again to stretch it out a little further. After just a few minutes, I saw another monolith emerge from the shadows, just as perfectly fashioned as the last one, but the smooth, dimly reflective surface of the polished stone had been marred by deep, intentional scratches. Something had clawed or chiseled away grooves in the rock. I drew a little closer, this time keeping a few feet between me and the stone, and I scanned the whole mess of carved marks. It wasn't a random pattern of vandalism. These were words, in a much different script from the circle-based language inscribed into the surface by its builders. I was about to turn away when something about the shape of one of the letters caught my eye. When I looked back at the scrawled message, I recognized a part of it.
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 22
