by Peter Nealen
[Come,] he signed. [Get everyone aboard the train. We cannot be sure that the enemy did not penetrate the tunnel behind us. The engineers will drop the entire last section of the tunnel behind us, and we do not want to be close when they do.]
The sign he used was closer to “builders” than “engineers,” but that was a word that hadn’t quite made it into the lexicon when the sign language had been developed. It had been considered above the indig’s understanding.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff stepped closer to Gaumarus, his dark eyes seemingly focused on the huddled mass of armored and unarmored humans behind them. [I will need your help, Friend of Hunters,] he signed. [You must assure them that they will meet with no harm.]
Gaumarus looked him in the eyes. [Is that true?] he signed. Faced with the immediacy of the situation his strange, grim fearlessness had returned. It was as if he had subconsciously accepted that death was imminent and unavoidable, and that therefore fear was pointless. Worry about his family was different. But here and now, he had something else to focus on, and it was keeping him on a somewhat even keel.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff studied him for a time. [It is,] he replied. [I understand if you do not trust me now. But you must. Fighting together is the only way that both our peoples can survive.]
Gaumarus pointed to the rifle in Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s hands, then at the train. [None of this was made to fight them, was it?] he signed. [It was made to fight us.]
If he had been human, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff might have sighed. As it was, he gave no physical reaction that Gaumarus could understand. [Of course,] he signed. [But not how you think.] He pointed toward the train again. [Come,] he repeated. [There is little time.]
Gaumarus nodded, suddenly weary. [We will have to talk later, you and I,] he signed. Without waiting for a reply, he turned back toward the tunneler. “We should hurry and board the train,” he called. “The indig are going to collapse that tunnel behind us, and I don’t think we really want to be here for the shockwave. Not that they’ll especially care if we are or not.”
Colonel Piett looked up at him, his eyes focusing a little more than they had since Gaumarus had first seen him in the tunnel. “How are they going to do that?” he asked.
“Presumably the same way they blasted this cave out of the rock, sir,” Gaumarus replied. “We really should go.” He studied the fat colonel for a moment. “Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff assures me that we will not be harmed.”
“Do you believe him?” Morav Dun asked, looming beside the colonel.
Gaumarus looked the Knight Subcommander in the eyeslit. “Yes, I do,” he said, slightly surprised to discover that he meant it. “I don’t think they would have rescued us from the M’tait if they intended to kill us.” What the indig intended to do later was still an open question. But that they had decided that the M’tait were a greater threat than the humans was pretty clear.
For a long moment, his hand still on his powergun, Morav Dun studied him, then looked at Kan Tur and Xanar Dak. Fleetingly, Gaumarus might have seen something pass between them, seen Kan Tur straighten slightly—though he seemed to hold himself tall and straight as a matter of course anyway. But Gaumarus couldn’t help but think that Morav Dun wasn’t happy with the entire situation, not least because a Provenian Corporal and two of his subordinate Knights were taking charge.
“Very well,” the Knight Subcommander said finally. He turned to Colonel Piett and spoke quietly. The colonel finally nodded, his extra chin wagging. He was still sweating profusely, even though it was quite cool in the cavern at any distance from the still pinging and creaking tunneler.
Gaumarus nodded to Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, who motioned the humans toward the train. Squaring his shoulders, determined not to show fear despite—perhaps because of—Colonel Piett’s obvious reticence, he mounted the short steps into the train.
The car was furnished with low seats, lit by what looked like some sort of gas lanterns on the walls in each corner. The indig were just humanoid enough that they could share chairs or seats with humans, though not comfortably for either. Gaumarus found a seat near the front of the car, his coilgun between his knees and the muzzle angled away from directly overhead. He was confident he wouldn’t negligently discharge the weapon, but the electric cable and armature that appeared to power the train was up there, so it was best not to take chances. He saw several of the indig watching him, and kept his face composed as Kan Tur and Raesh took seats to either side of him.
It took longer than it should have to get the relative handful of humans aboard. Piett and several of his staff were clearly unnerved by everything that had happened, and were watching the armed indig with undisguised trepidation. The Knights just seemed disgusted that they were in such a pass, and refused to hurry for primitive “abos” with simple firearms.
But finally, everyone was aboard, and with a crackle of electricity, the clank of a drivetrain, and a whirr of movement, they were racing away into the darkness.
14
The train must have been moving far faster than Gaumarus had expected; the acceleration wasn’t stiff, but he never heard the boom of the blasts as the indig engineers collapsed the tunnel behind them. Or maybe they were waiting longer than he’d expected, especially given the delay in getting the train loaded. Without windows, there was no way to gauge how fast they were moving, or how much distance they had already traveled.
Sooner than he’d expected, he found himself pressed against the forward wall of the car. They were slowing. He looked up at Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, but the scout wasn’t looking toward him; he was talking to one of his indig compatriots.
He was going to have to stop thinking of Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff as a scout. More realistically, he was a spy. But did that really matter, now that everything had changed?
There would be no going back to the way things had been before, not after this. Even if the M’tait could be driven off without wrecking the planet like Gdan had been, nothing would ever be the same between the humans and the indig. Nothing would ever be the same between him and the mountain tribe warrior he had called friend.
The train creaked and clanked to a stop, and the hatch swung open. Brighter orange light flowed in through the portal. The other indig warrior with Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff pointed toward the hatch, clicking and chirping. He didn’t need to use the sign language; his meaning was clear. “Get off.”
This time, Morav Dun took the lead, glancing at Kan Tur and Xanar Dak as he did so. Colonel Piett and his staff stayed where they were, and had to be prodded to their feet by indig fighters.
At least the indig didn’t use their weapons; they simply grabbed handfuls of dirty uniforms and hauled them up.
Gaumarus stepped off the train behind Kan Tur, looking around. Despite all his fears and worries—thoughts of his family had returned with a vengeance on the blind train ride—he couldn’t help but gape with astonishment.
The train was parked on a platform just outside of a darkened tunnel. The orange light, that he had expected to be cast by larger versions of the gas lamps inside the car, was not artificial.
Sunlight blazed down on reddish-orange rock on the other side of the train. Looking through the gap between the cars, he could see that the platform was on a ledge set back in the side of a deep crevasse that plunged another hundred meters below, while the rocky walls reared at least seventy-five meters above.
The platform was sheltered by a rock overhang that jutted out over the crevasse far enough that he couldn’t see the sky. The cave beneath it stretched back even farther into the cliff face.
And in that cave was a city.
He couldn’t take it all in at once. There was easily another company of mountain tribesmen waiting on the platform, their rifles mostly held at port arms, ammunition belts crossed over their long vests. One of them, with crests on both shoulders, stepped forward and gestured for them to follow him. Morav Dun nodded gravely, hefti
ng his powergun to point the muzzle at the stony ceiling above. He turned back to the rest of the Knights and said something in their language. Gaumarus couldn’t understand the words, but he understood the casual tone of the Knight Subcommander’s voice. He would comply with their escort because he had to, but he would not admit that Knights of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster could be at the mercy of “abos.”
With the escort fanning out to either side of the small knot of battered, shell-shocked humans, they stepped off the platform and started down the nearest avenue through the city.
The buildings looked at first glance to have been carved out of solid rock. Some were only one or two stories, while others connected ceiling to floor like massive, blocky columns. The architecture was uniformly simple; the buildings were mostly round or octagonal, with flat roofs where they had roofs at all. Windows faced the open crevasse, but as they passed into the maze of streets and buildings beyond the platform, Gaumarus could see other windows in houses farther back in the shadows, mostly lit by oil or gas lamps like the ones in the train car.
It quickly became evident that the city was far larger than it had first appeared. Brief glimpses down boulevards showed streets stretching out of sight around a curve in the crevasse. Given what he’d seen already, Gaumarus wondered if they had started with a natural cave and blasted or carved even more out as the city grew.
There weren’t a lot of mechanisms in evidence, but there was plenty of metal and the workmanship was largely superb. Most of the tools looked like they wouldn’t quite work in human hands; it was just as clear that they’d been made for the indig as the rifles their escorts were carrying.
Some of the closer buildings, Gaumarus noted as he passed, weren’t actually carved out of the rock of the cave, but had been built of cunningly-fitted stone blocks. The blocks were so finely cut and fitted that in many places it was almost impossible to detect the seams where one stone ended and another began.
The indig didn’t hide as the humans were paraded through the city. Males paused to watch them, and the females—larger than the males, generally stronger, but possessed of considerably slower reflexes, which meant they rarely left the safety of the creche—watched from the windows, some with their tiny offspring still clinging to their backs. He couldn’t understand any of the speech, which seemed even stranger than what he’d heard Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff speak, but there was a tension in the air as they passed, a strange combination of curiosity, fear, and hostility.
It was nearly a kilometer, if he was figuring right, from the platform to their destination. And given that the cliff city continued to stretch beyond the massive edifice set back in the rock wall, curving out of sight, he guessed that the entire settlement couldn’t be less than two kilometers from end to end, and there was no way of telling just how far back into the rock it went.
But he thought he could guess why no one had ever imagined that it was here. Set so far back into the rock wall, it would have been completely invisible from space or the air. There might have been a thermal bloom in the crevasse, but surrounded by so much solid rock, it might still easily escape notice. Especially if no one was looking for it. And everyone knew that the indig didn’t build cities.
A half-circle courtyard stretched bare and open in front of the massive, metal-sheathed doors leading into the huge central building. Somehow, he knew it was a tribal meeting place of some sort; the more intricate carvings over the doors and the reliefs that looked like some of the markings tooled on the mountain tribesmen’s vests suggested that.
So did the armed guards in thick-walled stone guard posts outside, manning more of the heavy-caliber rotary guns that he’d seen in the battle with the M’tait in the box canyon.
He studied the guards as their escort stepped up to the doors. There seemed to be an awful lot of them. Coupled with the seventy-five or a hundred escorting the meager couple of dozen humans…
Suddenly remembering something that Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff had said, he counted the guards he could see up on the dais before the doors. Then he nodded to himself. Twenty. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff had called the city The City of the Twenty Tribes. Which meant that each tribe was going to be represented in the guard force, as well as, presumably, the council inside. It seemed that the mountain tribes might not trust each other any more than they trusted the humans.
Whatever the parley at the doors was about, it concluded, and the doors swung open. They did not swing open to the sides, but lowered inward, eventually lying flat on the floor when they were fully open.
The indig with the twin crests on his shoulders led the way inside. About half the escort stayed outside, and Gaumarus couldn’t tell in the short glimpse he had as the humans were prodded along to follow, whether or not the different tribal markings were evenly distributed between those who entered and those who stayed.
His own curiosity somewhat surprised him, but if he’d taken the time to think about it, he would have realized what he was doing easily enough. As long as he was focused on the fascination of their hosts and learning things that he had subsequently thought impossible, he couldn’t fall back into the black despair where thoughts of the nightmare presently squatting on the Monoyan Plain, possibly having already killed or captured the rest of his family, led.
The inside of the big meeting hall was an enormous cavern. It almost looked natural; it either was a naturally-formed cave or it had been rough-hewn to look like one. The only places where the walls weren’t raw, irregular rock was where the tribal insignias had been carved. Those crests, strange, asymmetrical, interweaving patterns of dozens, if not hundreds of lines, were lit brightly by what might have been electric arc lights. The rest of the cave was lit by more of the shrouded gas lights. It made for a strange interplay of actinic white and warm yellow-orange.
Given the multiplicity of guards outside, he’d expected a council inside. He was somewhat surprised to see a lone indig standing in the center of the vast chamber, wearing a simple mountain tribe vest and holding a repeater across his shoulders.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was suddenly at Gaumarus’s shoulder, a clawed hand on his arm, propelling him to the front. [This is Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold,] he signed. [He is the over-chief of the mountain tribes for this season.]
[What do I do?] Gaumarus signed. He didn’t know whether he was supposed to bow or otherwise salute the over-chief, or even if he should, as a Provenian soldier, once the custom was explained to him.
[You should lay down your weapons in the presence of your conquerors,] Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold signed.
Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff held up a hand to forestall Gaumarus’s reply, speaking rapidly to the over-chief. Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold turned all four eyes on the younger warrior, listening but not responding. Then he turned his attention back to Gaumarus.
[Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff tells me that you are friends, not captives,] he signed. [But humans are not our friends. They never have been, and they never will be.]
“What is he saying, Corporal?” Morav Dun demanded. “More importantly, what have you told him? You should know better than to try to negotiate without the knowledge of your betters.”
Gaumarus glanced at Kan Tur and Sergeant Verheyen, but neither had any help for him. “I simply asked what the custom for greeting an over-chief was, sir,” he said stiffly. “I was told that we are captives, but Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff insists that we are not. The over-chief, Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold, doesn’t believe that we can be friends. That’s all that’s been said.”
Morav Dun looked over at Colonel Piett for a moment, then seemed to decide that there was no good in appealing to the clearly unmanned officer. “I will tell you what to say, Corporal,” he said. “You will translate. And translate exactly, you understand?”
“Would it not be wiser to allow Corporal Pell, who knows the indig better than we, to speak freely, and keep us apprised?” Xanar Dak said. That he
used his translator, broadcasting his words in Oxidanese, did not go unnoticed. And from the way Morav Dun’s helmet snapped around to stare at him, the Knight Subcommander had understood the challenge as well, all too clearly.
But Kan Tur had stepped up beside Gaumarus as well, and Gaumarus found himself surrounded by Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff and two looming, armored Knights. He could feel Morav Dun’s eyes boring into him, even though he could not see them behind the tinted vision slit.
“Very well, Corporal,” Morav Dun finally said. “You may proceed. But you are to keep us apprised of everything that is said, understood?”
Gaumarus, for his part, looked at Sergeant Verheyen. The other man looked flustered, and glanced back at Colonel Piett. The colonel didn’t look terribly aware of much of anything at the moment. Verheyen gulped, looked at Gaumarus, and shrugged.
“I will do my best,” Gaumarus said, then turned to Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold. [Yes, Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold,] he signed, [There is much bad blood between our peoples. But Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff and his tribe-followers saved us from creatures that would kill or enslave all of us, human and indig.] Exactly what the sign for “indig” meant to them, he’d never really been able to tell. [The raiders from the sky are monsters who do not care about our war or our history. They only come to take and destroy.]
[They are your problem,] Raider of the Enemy’s Stronghold signed. [You have seen The City of the Twenty Tribes. It has stood for many turns before your people came, and will stand for many turns after these raiders from the sky have destroyed you.] He shifted his gaze for a moment. [Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff is young, and has perhaps spent too much time away from his tribe.]
Gaumarus wished more than ever that he could read indig body language. For all he could see, Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff took the remark without reaction.
[Perhaps he is,] Gaumarus signed, acutely aware of the stares from Morav Dun and many of the Knights. He wasn’t translating as he went, though he wondered just how garbled a translation from sign language to Oxidanese to whatever language the Knights spoke amongst themselves might be. [But he rescued us from the raiders from the sky. We did not ask him to bring us here. I believe that he simply saw that he had no other choice.]