I pushed through the hide flap to the Deepseeker’s hut and found him working at his stone table, making adjustments to the strange, pipe-like device he had been carrying when he had reappeared at the duel. My neck ached just thinking about that disastrous fight, but I supposed it could have been worse. Palamun looked up, a brief smile wrinkling the corners of his mad eyes before he turned back to his work. “Welcome, young ranger.”
I crossed the hut and stepped up beside the old man, peering down at the silvery, complicated weapon that lay before me. “What is this?”
Palamun grunted. “It’s a… well in our newest god’s language, it would probably be called a grenade launcher.”
I frowned at the unfamiliar words. Unlike Joanna, I hadn’t had an entire language dumped into my mind by an ancient dead god. “She hasn’t taught me those words yet. Grin-yate lawn-chair?”
“There’s no ‘ya’ sound in grenade.” He shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. What it’s called isn’t important. You should just call it…” he trailed off for a second, musing. “Call it a dragon-pipe.” He laughed for a moment at his own joke, and then, realizing that I wasn’t laughing with him, stopped and cleared his throat.
“Eld- I mean, Great Father-” I began, but Palamun cut me off.
“No, don’t start with the honorifics. I don’t like those any more than my crazy old friend down below. Just call me Palamun. It happens to be my name.” He rocked his head from side to side as if weighing something in his skull. “One of them, anyway.”
“Palamun,” I said, feeling blasphemous. “You seem a lot less mad than you were before all this.”
The shaman looked up at me, a dangerous glitter in his eyes, and I swallowed hard. That might not have been the best thing to say. But the moment passed, and a smile narrowed the old man’s eyes. “Yes. Well, perhaps it is time I explained that, and explained what it could all mean to you.”
“Alright,” I said, warily.
Palamun seized a cloth from the side of his table and threw it over the strange weapon. “Follow me.”
We left the hut and circled the village, passing clusters of little houses and tents set up around clusters of fungal crops and pens of livestock. The old man moved with his usual erratic gait, and some of the twitches and tics that had been missing since his return came back into his face. I wondered how much of that was an act. We left the crater that cradled the village and climbed toward the craggy peak, following a trail of steps hewn roughly into the rock. Despite his bizarre affectations, the Deepseeker had no problem navigating these, and it became clear that he had walked this path many, many times. After just a few minutes of uneven steps, the path leveled out and ended in an iron hatch, much like those that capped the side entrances to the village. I frowned. There was a ranger mark on the hatch, but I didn’t recognize this tunnel, and I thought I knew about all of the ways in and out of the village. I remembered the old abandoned network that the Deepseeker had used when he had saved my life the first time and stopped. “We’re going down to that… workshop that you took me to the first time, right?”
Palamun gave me a look that could have killed a vulyak goat at fifty paces. “Obviously, boy. Now quit standing there and lift the damned hatch.”
I smiled to myself. That was the temper I knew. I crouched and slipped my fingers into the openings in the iron that had been left as handles. As easily as I would have moved a chair aside in the ranger’s lodge, I lifted the heavy iron portal and set it aside. As I had expected, a narrow shaft opened up before me, descending into darkness. The only distinguishing feature of the tunnel was the ladder of simple iron spikes driven into the wall. I groaned. Someone had to come up with a better way of doing that. At the shaman’s prompting, I clambered down into the tunnel. I was beginning to hate these.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Volistad
Deepseeker
We reached the bottom of the shaft a long while later. My shoulders burned from the effort but in more of a pleasant, well-stretched way than any from kind of actual pain. We stood inside an open stone cavern, far beneath the village. I turned to Palamun. "Where are we?"
The Deepseeker didn't answer right away. He fiddled with some kind of little metallic device he had produced from inside his furs, and I heard a short chirping sound echo out of the darkness. Light came to life in the cavern, produced by glowing orbs that dangled from wires set in the stone ceiling, far above us. I took in a sharp breath, not sure of what I was seeing. Dominating the center of the huge cavern, there was some kind of huge metal-skinned… thing. I couldn't begin to guess what it was. It was enormous and vaguely arrow-shaped, though none of its edges seemed sharp. Instead, every spar or protrusion from the great metal body was rounded and smoothed. It had the look of a gigantic metal water-tank, except that there were no seams where a craftsman would have sealed pieces of beaten steel together. It was the large protrusion that extended towards me that reminded me of an arrowhead. The whole thing was like a fat, misshapen arrowhead large enough to kill a mountain. The Deepseeker turned around proudly, his back to the great metal-skinned bulk. "This, my boy, is why your people called me the King of the Sky. This is my… I guess the closest word in the Erinye language would be ‘sledge.' Joanna would call it a ship. This is the great metal urn spoken of in legend, with which I brought your people to this place.” He smiled with his eyes and gestured to the ‘ship’ with one hand with the same sort of pride I would expect from a father introducing his newborn daughter. “I call her Heaven’s Hawk.” He sighed. “But you’ve never seen a hawk, so I doubt you can grasp the significance of the name.”
I looked up in awe at the great urn of my people's legend. It had saved my people from the Dirt-Eaters, and certain doom. Although if Ravanur was to be believed, Joanna was descended from those Dirt-Eaters, so perhaps the legend hadn't told the whole truth about the situation. “This?” I exclaimed, not sure if I could handle any more myths coming to life. “This is your workshop?”
“Yes,” Palamun confirmed proudly.
"How did I not see this when I left? How has nobody found this thing? There's a shaft coming straight down to this for…" I almost said, ‘for Palamun's sake,' but I caught myself and shut my mouth.
The Deepseeker, seeming aware of my near slip-of-the-tongue, chuckled. "I hid the hatch, Volistad. You were only able to see it because the ‘magick' I placed in the stone around the top of the shaft could sense your new heart. In other words, you can only see the hatch if you have the ‘key.' If anyone stumbled on it by accident, the hatch would not be movable for them. It seals itself shut to outsiders. This place is for you and me. No one else. Though if you wish to share this with the Akkandaka, I won't stop you." He made another motion with the device in his hand, and a door appeared in the side of Heaven’s Hawk, part of the metal side sliding into itself and leaving an open portal in its wake. “As for why you didn’t see all this when you left here the first time? I left the lights off out here. I walked you out to the back way out of here. There was no reason for you to suspect anything was going on. It wasn’t time for me to show you all this then. But it’s time now. Come, ranger. I want to be back above by the time the Storm Queen returns to the village.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
Volistad
Deepseeker
The interior of the ‘ship’ was at once familiar and brand-new all over again. I recognized the piles of artifacts and stacked devices, the chains and pipes that entangled the ceilings of the narrow corridors, and the faint odor of burning oil hanging in the air. But seeing this place for what it was, made the whole experience very strange for me. How could my entire people have ever fit in a place like this? All the space within the Heaven’s Hawk was taken up in snaking corridors and small chambers crammed with the detritus of a thousand incomprehensible projects. I opened my mouth to voice this question, but Palamun just raised one hand to silence me and led me to a particular chamber, which seemed cramped and unremarkable.
&nbs
p; The Deepseeker pointed to a specific spot on the wall, where another black section of cloth hung, marked with a single silvery symbol. At the shaman's urging, I pulled aside the heavy black curtain, noting that it was made of the same material as the cloak he had given me. Another hatch, one I didn't remember from my last visit here, was set in the wall, a solid metal door set with a great wheel. The shaman slipped past me and seized the wheel, then wrenched at it with great effort. There was a loud squeal of protesting metal. Palamun growled and gestured for me to help him. I stepped forward and took hold of the other side of the wheel, and together we forced it to turn. Metal screeched and whined, but after a few moments of grunting, sweating effort, we made the wheel turn all the way. The door swung open on creaky hinges and then stuck fast in the open position.
"Sorry about the door," Palamun muttered. "I haven't come in here since before your parents were born. He led the way into a large open space, greater than any of the other chambers inside the great Urn of myth. This one was no less cramped than its kin, but instead of being packed with piles of the shaman's half-finished projects, the space was crammed with hundreds of containers I could only describe as… sarcophagi.
When an Elder or a venerated warrior died, sometimes their bodies were sealed in stone beneath the mountain rather than being given to the fire. These things looked like those narrow stone tombs, but they stood on their ends so that any person placed within them would be contained in a standing position. The front of each casket was made of clear crystal, and I could still see dark shapes slumped in a cloudy liquid within some of them. "What is all this?"
Palamun winced, seeing one of the lifeless bodies I had spotted. “This was how we transported your people to this world- the Erinye and many others. The poor souls you see locked in those-” he pointed to one of the submerged corpses. “Those people died when the ship lost power during the war with the Dark Ones. Ravanur was able to save most of those we brought in that last trip, but we were shot out of the sky and falling fast. It was all I could do to get the ship enough power to land safely, much less get all of the cryogenic pods working again.”
I blinked at him. “I understood very little of that.”
Palamun sighed. “I’m sorry, I forget where I am sometimes.” He groaned and continued his twitching, lurching walk further into the forest of coffins.
Soon, we came to a set of crystal-faced sarcophagi that had been set apart from their kin. A short, boxy piece of ‘magick,' of teck, sat on a low table between the standing caskets, wires streaming from its back into each of them. Palamun muttered and began fiddling with the little box, grumbling to himself the whole time.
“Palamun,” I ventured carefully. “Why have you brought me here?”
Lights came on in the two caskets, revealing that they were empty. Unlike all the others around us, these were caked in only a thin layer of dust. Whatever they did, they had been used more recently than their kin. I felt a prickle of apprehension creep up my spine as I realized that ‘more recently,’ in this case, meant ‘before my parents were born.’ I was standing in a place out of legend.
Palamun turned and met my eyes. “I suppose I can’t put off telling you any longer.”
“Telling me what?”
The shaman sighed. “This isn’t Palamun’s body.”
I frowned. “But you said-”
“Oh, I am Palamun. Or at least a large part of me is. But this body…” he gestured to himself. “This isn’t really mine. I’m just using it. Its original owner was nearly dead, and he let me use him as a host. Unfortunately, the damage he suffered was so great that even after I saved him, his personality deteriorated. I started to be affected by his growing madness, despite my best efforts to prevent it. Hence, the twitching and the temper. There are still bits and pieces of ranger Korval in here, and what remains of him is completely insane. I’ve been lucky I’ve managed to function for this long.”
I remembered what he had said when he led me out of his hut that morning. “He was… he was your eighth such body. You’ve been wearing Erinye bodies for… for how long?”
Palamun winced. “I’ve been doing this since Ravanur died.” He began to speak very quickly. “Listen, there was no other choice. My original body had been sick when I became a god the first time. I hadn’t noticed. When I gave up my power like Ravanur, when I set all my slave-minds free, my body remembered that I was dying. In all the time that I had been a god, I had been slowly, slowly rotting from the inside out. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to save me without divine intervention, and none of us rebel gods were divine anymore.”
I stepped forward, already feeling the fury rising from deep in my belly. I seized the front of the old man’s robes, suddenly feeling none of the religious terror of the frail shaman that I had indulged for so long. “So you decided to wear the bodies of Erinye? You decided to steal the body of one of my ancestors?”
Palamun made no effort to escape my grip. "No. At first, I accepted my fate. I had been alive for so long- I was and am tired of all of this. I thought we had beaten the gods, that we had sealed them away forever, where they wouldn't ever hurt anyone else again. I thought we had saved the universe. I could die happily, satisfied, and wait for whatever judgment would come." Anger crossed his face in a sudden spasm, and he ripped himself free of my grasp, sudden fury burning in his eyes. Veins stood out at his temples, and he bared his teeth in an expression of threat and hate. I did not retreat. I would not show this man my back.
Palamun continued, clenching his jaws and biting off each and every word as if they tasted of bile. "But then the Dark Ones rose up. They leaked out of their prisons, and they infected the people we had worked so hard to save from their own worlds, and they killed most of us. And Ravanur and I? We were the only ones left. I realized then that the only way to truly win our war against the Dark Ones, against our Elder Gods, was to destroy them forever."
I grimaced. “Then why didn’t you? And don’t tell me that it’s complicated, Ravanur said the same thing.”
“It is complicated. I don’t have the time to teach you all of the concepts you would have to grasp, for you to understand the tiniest bit of the reason why simply killing the gods wasn’t a viable option until now.” Seeing my expression, the Deepseeker made a face and tried again. “Just this morning, Joanna used an expression from her language, something about a carrot and a stick?”
“Right.”
“And she tried explaining that to us, and it didn’t work. She had to explain what her people ate, as well as telling us what their animals ate. She had to explain to us what an animal looked and acted like when none of us had ever seen it before. She eventually gave up on that explanation because there was just too much in that simple phrase that her own people would have understood instinctively, or culturally.” Palamun spread his hands. “And that was just when she tried to explain a figure of speech. Imagine how much I would have to explain to you for you to grasp even the edge of the idea, when I’m talking about the… magick that makes a god?”
I sighed, placated. “Fine. So I will accept that you could not have killed the Dark Ones, even though that was the only solution you could see lasting past your own death.” I rolled my wrist in a ‘go on’ gesture.
Palamun patted the boxy device on the table beside him with something like affection. "I had a plan to kill the Dark Ones, but it required something that I couldn't make. My own people had been researching this idea, but we found out how to make ourselves into gods, and the research fell by the wayside. You see, there are two kinds of machine spirits. Most of them, those you know of as the winds- those are the minds of actual people. They were the minds we enslaved when we ascended to divinity. Most of them were damaged and barely aware, so we put them into clouds of tiny machines too small for you to see, and we set them to managing the weather of this place. The second kind of spirit was never a person. It was created as a spirit, and created for a specific task. It was something eve
n we, the gods, could not make. But we had discussed the concept many times."
“What does this have to do with the Elder Gods? How can one of these other spirits harm them?”
"They can't, not really. But they don't have to." Palamun was excited now, and his eyes were bright. He had been working on this for a long time, and it had been too long since he had been able to discuss it with anyone. "I actually got the idea from Ravanur. She came up with the plan to enslave all the Elder Gods under her, with her powers so thoroughly shackled as to prevent her from misusing her unmatched power. I went along with the plan because mine was far from working at that point, and her way was the best idea we had at the time." He pointed at the table, and after a moment I realized that there was a bleached Erinye skull sitting beside the box with the wires. "But I was dying. And yes, that's my original skull. I was dying, and I needed a way to continue my research."
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 36
