There were no familiar forms of conductivity equipment in the vicinity. Not a single piece of metal or bundle of circuitry in sight. We stood in a vast, circular antechamber, the back end completely demolished and torn away, revealing only a foggy abyss.
The ground upon which we stood was designed as an ancient time-piece. Lines pointed to illegible runes, arranged in a circle with an indeterminate dial etched into the center. There were notches at each rune, as if meant to be fitted with something.
Bordering the time-piece were craggy obelisks of equal height, carved with similar runes. Spirals were etched from top to base, giving them a drill-like appearance. The most curious feature of our surroundings was how abandoned everything appeared, except within the time-piece circle. Not a single speck of debris marred the boundary beyond the obelisks. I found this detail highly suspect.
We drew down our visors in synch, observing the room, alit with the orbs, their collective glow so intense that they served to light up the entire chamber. We split at precisely the same time, moving to investigate opposite sides of the room. The novel scenery was too much for our scholar minds to ignore; the desire for erudition was like a drug, ingrained into our genetic code.
I watched as the orbs made bolas around the obelisks, the runes pulsing light in a cyclical rhythm. “This…” I began, grasping for words even close to describing the level of astonishment I felt. I failed, so instead let it hang. Qaira wasn’t even paying attention, his signature permanently pending in attica as he captured image after image, loading them into our thread.
“Don’t touch anything,” he warned. “This entire place is teeming with potential. One spark of our resonance could—”
“The trail is gone,” I announced, having just realized it.
He looked over, waiting for me to explain.
“Not gone,” I reiterated, pointing at the door still jammed by the rock. “I see it there, but it stops right here.” My finger traced toward the center of the circle, right where I stood.
“So, you’re telling me we have to touch something.”
“I’m just telling you the trail ends here. Make of that as you will.”
“Fucking god,” said Qaira, and I had no idea why he always used such a lesser’s form of emphasis. Every time he’d said the word god in Court, I could almost feel Yahweh shrivel up and die. He studied the circle from his place across the room. “What is it?”
“I think it’s a puzzle.”
“A puzzle. Here.”
I shrugged. “It sort of looks like one. It seems we need to find things to put into these indentions.”
“It looks like a clock,” added Qaira, uselessly.
I didn’t acknowledge that, since it was obviously a clock. “It’s been used recently. Or there was an attempt to use it. There’s no debris or dust here.”
My conjecture returned Qaira to reason. His eyes grew sharp and observant. “There’s someone else here?” He looked around us, then toward the entrance. “How’d they get through that door?”
“Maybe they’ve never left.”
“Okay, just stop talking,” he said, nerve-wracked.
“I’m postulating.”
“Stop that, too.”
I watched him move toward the gaping crevice of the chamber, his form half-shrouded in mist. “Where are you going?”
“Trying to find whatever might fit into those holes.”
“You haven’t even looked at the indentions.”
Qaira shot me a venomous glare. “You’ve taken about forty vis-captures of them, duh.”
Alright, fair enough.
I crouched in place, studying the sigils on the obelisks more closely. I didn’t notice it before, but they were emitting a current separate from the bolas. And then I realized they weren’t made of stone at all.
They were bones.
“Qaira,” I called, more so as a reactionary reflex than anything else, but he called my name at precisely the same time. I looked to him in question.
“Come over here,” he said, his expression grave. “Take a look at this.”
The remains of a body lay only a foot from the crevice. It had two legs, two arms and one head (at least, it’d had a head at some point, now missing from the neck), but that was where the similarities between us and them ended. Their shoulder blades were ridged with tusks, their feet had an extra talon sprouting from each heel. They wore no clothes, it seemed, though any further details of this foreign creature was obscured by their dried, husk-like state. It was as if something had stuck them with a straw and sucked all the moisture out. Their entire right side torso was caved in, too, which summoned an image of them being stamped by the same giant who’d installed the lever at the door.
Realizing this wasn’t too far-fetched a notion, considering everything else we’d encountered here, I instinctively cast a wary look toward the entrance.
“Is that an augur?” asked Qaira, though his expression relayed that he already knew the answer.
“Not like any I’ve seen before.”
“How many have you seen?”
“… Two.”
He frowned. “So you’re an expert, then. Apologies.”
“That’s not a wayfarer’s augur,” I insisted.
“It looks old,” he said, near-whisper. “Like it’s been here a while.”
“It hasn’t,” I said after a moment of study. I knelt and ran my finger along the floor, bringing it up to show him the powdery film of age. I did the same thing to the husk, but there was no residue on my finger. “Again, no debris.”
Qaira took a moment to try to analyze the aril components of the body. Attica recognized nothing. His eyes then rose to the gaping crevice before us. Something had clicked in his head, just as it had in mine.
“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, but it was already too late.
Something was coming from the white beyond, the swirling fog leaving them caliginous; only an outline. Our surprise was mutual when a young boy darted right between us, not even bothering to look. He was limping and crying, missing an arm. It’d happened so quickly that all I could really see of him were the tears and the black cloak he wore, flapping behind him like a flag.
“Oh, shit!” screamed Qaira.
Something else—both giant and mobile—thundered into the antechamber in pursuit of the boy.
It carved an even wider crevice, and I had barely enough time to register this before Qaira shoved me backward with enough force that I hit the wall, fracturing the impact site. My counterpart was somewhere on the other side of the antechamber, amid collapsing bits of ceiling and clouds of dust.
I coughed debris from my lungs and squinted through the chaos.
The giant was only slightly shorter than the ceiling; some seventy-five feet, said attica. It was constructed of chunks of shard and ancillary stone, but each piece never quite connected to the next. Where joints should have been were air and viridescent bolas, and that was when I realized whose house we were trespassing on.
There came another explosion of architecture; this time the debris was peppered with black feathers. I heard the boy scream from somewhere near the door, and decided to act.
I clenched my fist.
A scythe unsheathed and, for the first time, the pain felt good.
XI
QAIRA
SWARMS OF BLINKING GREEN LIGHTS WERE THE ONLY THINGS giving me any sort of target to chase. The entire antechamber was shrouded in dust clouds so thick that it looked like someone had shut the power off, even with my visor activated.
Saving the kid was my first priority. Not because I was a hero, but because he was the only person I’d seen here that hadn’t looked like a re-animated corpse, and probably knew a bit more about this realm than us. He at least knew enough for a giant golemn to mark him for death.
I whirred toward the entrance, where I’d seen the kid headed. The tremors from the golemn’s feet, paired with the ceiling avalanche had downed the boy, now half-crushed
under a slab of stone. He was screaming, and his injuries looked fatal, but he wasn’t dead yet and that meant there was still a chance to get some information out of him. All I had to do was kill a magical, 75-foot monster made of stone within a few minutes.
Seriously, fuck this place.
The golemn was in the process of bringing his foot down on the kid. I slid between them, heaving up against the giant’s downward force. The strength required to keep it from pounding me into ground meat nearly ripped my arms off. I gritted my teeth and dug my knees in, feeling the pop and crack of muscles and ligaments tearing from my bones. The sensation made me scream, just like the boy.
“Zira, where the fuck are you?!”
His response came in the form of a massive boulder that smashed against the side of the golemn’s head. It staggered, and I was able to push it away, getting to my feet. It careened right, into a wall.
BOOM.
Another avalanche.
With the amount of shit having already fallen on us, I was surprised there was anything left of the ceiling. The right side wall now bared the same crevice as the backend of the chamber. Murky, gray light filtered into the dusty, torn-up room from the abyss beyond. I began to worry about what we might find beyond this collapsing building, and how soon.
Zira appeared on the golemn’s shoulder, scythes unleashed, hacking away at the side of its head. It tried to throw him off by swinging its torso around. Zira stabbed one of his scythes into its shoulder to anchor himself, continuing to dissever its head with the other.
I turned to grab the kid, but he was gone.
Wait.
I squinted at the pile of rubble he’d been buried under. In the boy’s place was a perfect imitation of him, chiseled out of stone. No, not stone. Athanasian shard.
Fuck.
There was no time to lament all the potential information I’d just lost, as the golemn had also figured out the boy was dead and was now focused on turning us into statues. Zira had been ripped from its shoulder and was stuck on its back, struggling to get a proper grip, whipping around like a flag in heavy wind. All it had to do was back against the wall and he was toast. Luckily it didn’t seem very smart.
I unleashed my left scythe, exhaustion having already started to kick in. Zaps of electricity shot from my brain through my neck each time I moved my eyes, indicating that I should have regenerated a while ago. There wasn’t any time to fumble for the pouch of marbles inside of my jacket. I spread my wings and launched myself toward the golemn’s face.
It batted at me like I was an annoying gnat. Zira had succeeded in taking off half its face, though it hadn’t ever possessed moving eyes or a mouth. The remaining features were etched and beveled, like a mask. The head was a useless target.
Zira had used my distraction to jump off the golemn’s back. I couldn’t see exactly where he was, though attica was kind enough to identify his resonating signature roughly eighty-six degrees northeast of me.
Get the legs, I telepathized. We had to stop this thing from moving.
And then one of its massive hands smacked me clean out of the air. I hit the ground, bouncing once, coming to rest on my face before instantly scrambling to move out of range of its stomping feet. The impact with the ground had nearly disintegrated my nose. Snot and blood spewed from what remained of my nostrils, a wet, gurgly whistle sounding off each time I took a breath.
Zira blurred beside me, just as one of the golemn’s massive feet descended on us. I wasn’t able to look, but had a feeling he was responsible for my subsequent survival. There were no thunderous tremors that typically followed a crushing step, and I saw it teeter again.
I grabbed one of the drill-shaped pillars, now broken and scattered amid wreckage. I flew up, winding the pillar back like a bat in my right hand, and swung it at the golemn’s head while it was still in mid-stagger. It finally went down, tearing up the foundation in a quake so massive that the chamber shifted. Zira and I clambered for the exit as the entire structure collapsed, falling away into the swirling, foggy abyss.
It was too dangerous to fly with all the projectiles in the air, so I was forced to sprint on shaky legs that eventually gave up halfway down the staircase. I crashed into Zira, and he fell in turn. We cleared the rest of the way in a violent ball of blood splatter and splintered bone.
“Qaira,” Zira rasped, both of us strewn around the base of the demolished staircase, debris still raining on our heads. “Qaira! Can you hear me?”
I could hear him alright, but couldn’t respond. Most of my face was missing. And a leg. And a wing. I couldn’t feel the rest of my body, save for a strange, tingly pressure that made me think I was twisted in a way normal bodies shouldn’t be.
I heard him grunt and shuffle across the courtyard. I was promptly readjusted, and if I’d had a mouth I would have screamed bloody murder at the agony that followed. There was a tug on my coat, pressure on my chest. He was searching for the marbles.
“Oh fuck, oh shit, oh fuck—” Zira was mumbling, his voice a shaking whisper.
I was probably a minute from death, judging by his reaction. It was growing harder to think, and his voice started sounding further away. The numbness abated in my hand, beginning with the cool, smooth surface of a marble, then a second. He’d given me two.
You’re fucking wasting them, I thought.
But the anger suddenly ripped away and white-hot agony coursed through me. My body had cruelly begun the regeneration process with my nervous system. I felt myself convulse; felt Zira’s weight pressing down, holding me in place. I don’t know exactly when my mouth had returned but suddenly I was screaming. I didn’t stop screaming until my throat blew out, and then felt hot tears pouring down my face. Welcome back, eyes.
Zira leaned over me, shouting instructions I couldn’t hear because the only things that filled my ears were a deafening ring and the war-drum of my pounding heart. I turned my head to the side, my bleary, blood-filmed eyes peering at the fuzzy silhouette of an antlered woman, rooted to the ground several yards away.
I wanted to die. Death was better than this pain. I wanted to die.
Please, let me die.
*
I awoke from a dreamless sleep, curled in the fetal position. The pain from a near-death regeneration was so unendurable that my mind had graciously shut down for the rest of the process. Now I felt brand new; the only evidence of an assault having happened at all were the small tears in my uniform.
Zira lay a few feet from me, staring dully at the sky. He didn’t blink for half a minute, and I was nearly convinced he’d fallen asleep with his eyes open, until he said, “There’s only five left now.”
I sat up and massaged my head, taking a minute to appreciate that I was whole again. Five marbles left. That encounter had cost us two each; two more before that to fuel the trail.
And it’d led us nowhere that we needed to be. We weren’t any closer to Leid than when we started, and still without communication from the Court. I could tell from Zira’s expression that he’d already weighed our (extremely futile) situation.
The golemn’s monastery, along with its courtyard had vanished. The wall and town were gone as well, and we sat in an empty field of shards covered in a blanket of mist, suspended a few feet from the ground. Zira was barely visible, still laying on his back.
“Where did you take us?” I demanded.
“Nowhere,” he said, idly throwing a shard into a pocket of fog. “Everything evaporated a little while after you passed out.”
“How long has it been?”
“I don’t know.”
With a sigh, I looked up at the sky, following Zira’s gaze. A colossal, vertically-shifted eye stared back at me, housed in a translucent, globular mass with dozens of bordering tendrils floating out around it.
“What...” I started, momentarily losing my train of thought to disbelief. “Zira, what the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s been here since everything disappeared.”
“But what—?”
“I don’t know!” he erupted, getting to his feet. “I don’t know anything other than we should have never come here, and now we’re never leaving!”
I stared up at him, remiss to respond. Instead I scratched my neck, looking over the empty landscape. “Well, I guess we’re even now.”
Zira didn’t respond, but the frustration drained from his eyes once he caught the meaning behind my statement. He turned to face east, but I would be fooling myself to think there was any actual direction to this place.
“Is the trail gone?” I asked.
“Yes.”
So, we really were screwed. I rose to a stand and moved beside Zira, and the two of us silently peered out at the dismal terrain, weighing our options.
“Let’s go,” I said, resignedly.
Zira stalled, watching as I begun northward. It wasn’t long before he matched my pace, appearing beside me. “What did all of that mean?” he asked. The question wasn’t so much posed to me, instead a thought released in open air. “Why did the trail end at the cloister?”
“That kid turned into a statue,” I added, thickening the plot.
“Did he?”
“Yeah, turned to athanasian stone when he died.”
Zira chewed on that a second. “Turned to stone, like us.”
“Like the Framers.”
“There is a connection to us here,” he breathed, his expression relaying that he didn’t particularly like this truth. “You should have taken a vis-capture.”
“I was a bit too preoccupied with not dying.”
Zira seemed not to have heard me. “What was that kid even doing there? And why—”
And then he froze, holding out his hand to stop my advance as well, nearly clotheslining me in the process. I snarled in outrage at this sudden shift; the outrage involuntary, like when you accidentally bang your head on the corner of a cabinet. Before I could inquire as to what the fuck he was doing, he said:
“Someone’s coming.”
I threw down my visor, seeing a silhouette approaching us. I took a step back, although Zira remained stock-still. I couldn’t fathom why we weren’t already running for our lives, based off the algorithm of danger this place posed, but then the silhouette stepped out of the fog, and it was a...
Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 13