The Stars Were Right

by Alexander, K. M.

  Names and dates were carved, painted, and scrawled onto any exposed surface, hundreds of them in hundreds of languages, like the discarded flags of ancient explorers atop a mountain. My mind wondered who they were. Adventurers? Homeless? Kidnapped victims such as myself? Did the owners of these names know what was going on in this tunnel? Or were these the names of Cybill's worshipers?

  A lattice of girders and supports formed a tangle behind me as I looked over my shoulder. In some ways I was relieved. I didn't want to look at the monster behind me. Having her twisted, horrific form blocked was a small comfort.

  Another roar shook the tunneler, the structure around me absorbing some of the sound as I moved deeper and deeper inside.

  Running down the center of the machine was a train of carts. Hardened stone sat in their bins, felled centuries earlier from a broken conveyor another two floors up. Catwalks ran around me like cobwebs, running the length of the tunneler, disappearing behind walls, and reemerging like the digestive system of an ancient leviathan.

  It was growing darker. I picked my way carefully and wished I had a lamp or a flashlight. In the increasing gloom it was difficult to get a sense of the ancient machine's scale. Occasionally a low-hanging beam would appear from the murk like an umbra from the shadows and attempt to crack open my skull. My pace slowed. I didn't need a whack to the head, and the thought of cutting myself on one of these rusty beams made me shudder. A cut could mean lockjaw, and I had seen one of my uncles die from contracting the disease. I didn't want to go that way.

  Somewhere in the distance water dribbled. Light from the bonfire would occasionally flicker through a recess, revealing pathways blocked by rubble older than my great-grandfather. In a few places the floor had collapsed, creating traps that disappeared into shadow and threatened to swallow even the most wary explorer.

  My progress changed from a hobble to a crawl. I used the shotgun as a cane, holding it out before me and feeling for obstructions in the dark. I was careful to test each step before I put weight on my foot. It was easy to imagine the floor collapsing, and I saw myself ending up somewhere deep below the earth in the chambers of the Sleeper.

  Black was somewhere nearby. I could hear the sound of hooves on metal ahead of me and something else, something very different from the metallic echoes. A deep thrum. It was slow. Less regular than a breath, but constant and vibrating through the rust like the heartbeat of some great whale.

  Cybill? No. She was massive and growing larger still, but to thrum like that? When I had last seen her she was the size of a small building and throwing a fit like a two-year-old. She was enormous, but not big enough to make that noise. At least not yet. This was the heartbeat of a giant.

  My mind became occupied trying to place the noise. I forgot my diligence at picking my way through the blackness.

  The floor creaked and then gave way.

  I slipped.

  My arms shot forward like javelins as I scrambled for a handhold. As I fell broken metal snags tore at my forearms, my hands, my chest. Something hard scraped skin off my forehead. For a second I was in free fall, then my fingers tightened around a beam.

  A hold!

  My shotgun fell away, I heard it clatter against something below and then nothing, as if it fell forever.

  Heart hammering, I wrenched myself upward, and felt my ribs pop and my shot bicep complain as I hauled myself from hanging over the abyss and back onto a small square space of rusted floor.

  I breathed deeply.

  My hands shook. I was grateful for the breath. I leaned against a wall and listened to my own heart beat against my sternum.

  The tunneler shook and I tensed. Cybill roared, but the sound was difficult to pinpoint. The fall had disoriented me. I wasn't sure which direction was forward or which led back to the bonfire.

  I wanted to give up.

  I was exhausted. I was in pain. I felt defeated.

  As if on cue, Wensem and Little Waldo seemed to emerge from the gloom, smiling at me. Behind them stood Samantha, her dark eyes flashing, and next to her was a beat-up looking Hagen, broken horn and all.

  I blinked. I shook my head trying to clear it.

  Were they real or was I hallucinating? As if in answer to my question Thaddeus stepped out; the expression on his frog-like face seeming to urge me forward. I rubbed my eyes in time to see August smiling at me from behind his mask, and somewhere over his shoulder were Fran and Doctor Inox and a shadowed Lilly Westmarch.

  I watched them and they watched me.

  Stand up, Wal. They seemed to say.

  I shifted. I hurt so much. I was disoriented. I was tired.

  Stand up. Stand up, Wal.

  Wensem and Little Wal needed time to escape. Samantha and Hagen might already be out, but what about the rest of Lovat? What about the innocent folk in the Sunk and upward through the city's levels? They'd be doomed if Cybill escaped.

  Stand up.

  Leaning against a wall wouldn't solve anything. I had to end this.

  Cybill was rising, her mind emerging from her long sleep. Right now her actions were awkward, slowed from generations of slumber and an incomplete ritual. As the fire warmed her, she'd become more aware. She'd want to escape, and she'd destroy anything in her path. What had Hagen called her? The Awakener?

  The thought of Cybill pulling herself through Lovat's levels and killing its citizens moved me into action. I needed to collapse this tunneler, crush Cybill before she could escape.

  But how?

  I was without my shotgun—my makeshift club. If I was in better health I might be able to push some of the most rotted beams over, but I couldn't muster the leverage or strength in my present condition. I had to find another way to collapse the tunneler and with it—hopefully—the Humes tunnel.

  The shotgun shells in my pockets bulged, feeling worthless and cumbersome without a rifle. I pulled them out and dropped them on the floor with echoey plunks. I felt for the Judge and breathed a sigh of relief when the warm metal greeted me. I was grateful it had remained in my waistband.

  Catching my breath, I tried to get my bearings. I could hear Black move somewhere to the right and above me. Hooves on metal. Plink plink plink. Again, I felt a thrum from whatever resided in this relic. A power conduit, perhaps? Some ancient generator? I stepped out gingerly, expecting the floor to give way a second time. It didn't.

  Wandering around in the darkness, trying to follow the sound of Black's hooves, I eventually found a ladder. I couldn't tell how stable it was, but my catwalk had ended and I wasn't left with another choice. Peter Black—Pan—was above me and I needed to find him before he found me.

  I climbed, testing each rung as I went. Groping in the darkness and each time putting my trust in the rusted steel bar, hoping it would hold my weight.

  I reached what I assumed was the next floor of the tunneler. It took me a few moments before I released my death grip on the ladder and felt out with a foot for purchase. Images of the floor collapsing kept my hands clung tightly to the ladder. It took even longer before I entrusted all my weight to the floor.

  All was shadow. Light from the outside was all gone now. I couldn't see a thing. I could hear Cybill roar occasionally and feel a shake as one of her tentacle things slammed against the tunnel, but there was no visible light this deep inside the machine.

  My progress across the second floor was even slower. I was that much higher above the broken floors below me, and that much more wary. I moved with the speed of a tortoise who expected each footstep to be his last.

  A fresh surge of adrenaline—my drug of choice now—burned through me like pitch. My heart hammered loudly and I worried it would give me away. Most of the pain in my knee, my chest, and even my arm was numbed, distant feelings on the edge of my senses.

  I can't say how long it took me to reach the room. Five minutes? Ten? An hour? Time is odd in complete darkness. When I first noticed the scant traces of light I thought I was hallucinating again. I half expected the forms
of my friends to reemerge from the blackness.

  Delving into the tunneler had allowed my eyes to grow accustomed to the pure darkness, and something was dancing across my irises. As I moved cautiously down the catwalk, more lights seemed to emanate before me from tiny portals, distant stars shining from a doorway I could barely make out.

  The room was small, with a bank of glowing objects that looked like mushrooms or eyeballs poking out from a black mass. The lights that burned from behind their plastic casings were so minute that I normally wouldn't have noticed them. They thrummed in chorus alongside the giant's heartbeat, glowing brightest at the apex and then receding to almost blackness as it faded.

  I carefully ran my hands over them, feeling the hardness of their shells and wondering what bizarre creation the ancient Lovatines had built. A few had play, allowing me to jiggle and maybe even press them like a button; others were shattered, barely hanging onto life as the dampness had eaten away at their shells.

  I stared at them with utter fascination. Finally reaching out, I touched the largest one labeled with some sort of runes that looked like a simplified version of Strutten. I was sure Samantha or Hagen would have been able to easily translate them. The object resisted any interaction at first, so I tried harder, pressing down on the button with my good arm.

  The heartbeat that had been so subtle boomed loudly. Then boomed again. The whole tunneler shook, and I could hear a few other sounds: a high-pitched whine, followed by another, and then a rattle like bones being dragged over stone.

  Machines long silent coughed into life. A bank of lights from somewhere behind me were flicking on one at a time. Their glow was harsh, cold, and white—nothing like the warm sodium lights of Lovat. They flickered and buzzed, bathing the interior of the tunneler in their frigid glow.

  The brightness forced my eyes shut as it ran toward me. Row after row of lights popping to life, growing brighter and brighter. I slumped in a corner trying to squeeze it out but it clawed its way in, forcing my eyes to readjust.

  It took a few moments before I was able to reopen my eyes. Even as I did, my vision was clouded and blurry. A form stood in the doorway I had passed through. I thought it was one of my hallucinations, but as my vision cleared, I could see it was Peter Black.

  I tried to recoil, but my back was to the wall of the little cabin.

  Black stood like some crazed demon. His hands curled like claws. His naked flesh looked paler and more alien in this new light. He rose above me on twisted, naked goat legs, like a grotesque statue carved by a madman.

  "Why. Don't. You. Leave. Me. Alone," growled Black, each word its own short sentence.

  I squinted up at him, feeling the machine's heartbeat below me booming to life, rising with more intensity and shaking the tunneler.

  Somewhere I could hear the screech of metal tearing itself apart with unyielding power.

  Black raised a hoof with the intention to strike me, but I was quicker, rolling away as it smashed into the space where I had sat.

  He was a blur of pink, twisted in the wrong ways.

  To my adjusting eyes he looked more like some blurry cartoon character, not the evil mastermind that reanimated the mummified corpse of a First. He barreled into the room, blocking my exit as I pushed myself into a standing position to face him.

  "You killed my friends," I stammered. My vision was sharpening up.

  The room we stood in appeared to be a small control room. A wall of knobs and buttons occupied one whole side. They were broken up by banks of small screens displaying odd patterns in blacks and greens. The only entrance was to the left of a large cracked window that occupied the wall opposite the buttons, giving the tunneler's operator a view on the comings and goings of his great machine.

  "I did what I needed to do. This world is wrong. The inhabitants are wrong. They are twisted mockeries of creation. Abhorrent, mewling simpletons who consume all they touch. We need a fresh Aligning. The world needs to be corrected," Black said, as he failed to kick me again.

  Dodging the second strike, I shook my head in disagreement. "You murdered innocent people. You wanted to murder an innocent child. The world isn't wrong, Black. You're wrong. You and...and..." I struggled for the right word, "…the things like you, things like you and that monster out there."

  "That 'monster' is my goddess! My queen! My beloved!" Black screamed.

  Now it was my turn to lunge, and Black wasn't fast enough. I slammed him against the wall, feeling his head smack backwards. I reached up and grabbed one of his swooping horns, pulled him forward, and used his momentum to carry him headfirst into the opposite wall. He grunted, slumped to the floor, then rolled over onto his pale backside and started up at me. A trickle of blood dribbled from the corner of one eye.

  I regarded the panel of buttons. Something I had done had awakened this machine. If it was still somehow working, perhaps I could try to get it to dig again. It would never truly work. The structure was too rotten, and I was sure it was too far gone to perform its intended function. But perhaps the very act of trying would cause the machine to tear itself apart, and maybe bring the tunnel down on top of it.

  It was a gamble, but my options were limited.

  I started smacking buttons, advancing across the small room to where Peter Black lay.

  He growled up at me, "Two thousand years ago, I'd be eating your heart while being sucked off by virgins in a glade."

  "Yeah?" I said, grabbing Black by a horn and jerking violently, lifting him to his feet and sending him sprawling behind me into a rusty bulkhead. He didn't fall over, but stumbled and shook his head, slightly dazed, then turned on me.

  "Yeah," he said, mimicking my tone. "You mortals are such fools. You face a demigod and yet treat him like a sad OLD MAN!"

  He kicked out at me, catching me in the chest. I heard a rib pop. I was flung backwards, struck an empty wall and smacked my head against hard metal. I could feel a warmth trickle down the back of my head and ooze onto my neck as I collapsed. My chest felt like it had been struck by an ox at full run. Something had to be broken. Pain lanced through my core. I struggled to breathe.

  Black advanced across the small room, his hooves banging like hammers against the floor. My mind reeled, body focused only on breathing.

  Breathe.

  Just Breathe.

  It hurt.

  BREATHE, dammit!

  "I hate you humans. Always have. You're always meddling. Always interfering." Hands clasped my throat like a vice grip. Black grabbed my neck and dragged me across the floor. "Always sticking your noses where they don't belong."

  He slammed me face-first into the wall. My eyes welled with tears and I think my nose broke, but so much of my body hurt that it was impossible to tell. My mouth tasted coppery and I knew it was blood. I was rolled onto my back. Black stood over me, his ridiculous penis swaying like a pendulum between two equally ridiculous-looking legs.

  My eyes rolled to the paneled wall. Knobs and buttons protruded and looked like forlorn faces. Somewhere in the distance Cybill thrashed.

  I hoped my friends were safe, and that my earlier visions of them weren't some ghosts returning to me. Wensem, Little Waldo, Hagen, and Samantha. Beautiful Samantha.

  I gazed up at Black's sneering face.

  Samantha.

  Black spat. Hot, wet spittle striking my forehead.

  Sam. Her eyes. That smile.

  My head lulled and I was staring at the panel again. Buttons. The largest in the panel with massive labels. One the color of a bright green apple, a large circle with some weird symbol next to it of angles and lines. Ancient letters. Beside it another button, another object, festooned with another set of hieroglyphics. This labeled in red with symbols I recognized as warnings all around it.

  I felt Black strike me, but it hardly hurt. My head lulled to the other side, staring out into the tunnel behind me, now lit with the bright white light. Blood seemed to arc away from my face and spattered across the floor. The slap was weak. I
had hardly felt it. My ribs, knee, arm, head, nose, legs, stomach, and even my hair hurt more. My cheek was strong; it could take a few slaps.

  Black struck me again. It was almost comical. My view changed as my head lulled again to the other side. The panel. I studied it some more. Hoping to glean more information.

  Stand up.

  Black slapped me a third time, and now I was laughing.

  "What's so funny?" Black snarled. In my delirium—feeding off madness and staring up into the eyes of a crazy demigod—I decided to make him guess. I suppose it was funnier at the time. More slaps followed. My view shifted from door, to panel, to door, then back to panel.

  "What's so funny?" Black demanded with a scream. I could feel his hot breath against my face. I blinked at him, and choked out my response in a blood-filled sigh.

  TWENTY-SIX

  "You...are...."

  It came out like a whisper, but I saw my blood spatter upwards against Peter Black's pink cheek.

  His eyes widened as the blast hit him in the stomach and threw him backwards. Confusion on his face.

  He hit the wall opposite me, struggled to stand, and stared at the smoking Judge. Black made a feeble attempt to cover a wound in his stomach the size of a dinner plate.

  "You are," I stated again—stronger—with a bit more self-assurance. I wiped blood off my face with the arm holding the gun, and wondered if Black would try anything. I was grateful that he didn't.

  He stared at me; hate, confusion, fear and pain all playing across his face.

  "Two thousand years," I said, repeating his words from earlier.

  He stammered and struggled to speak, but couldn't find his voice. I saw genuine fear on his face. Pools of blood darkened his pale flesh, and his breathing was rapid.

  "Eat my heart in a...." I thought, "What was it? A glade? Virgins and the like?"