“You can stop worrying so much,” Harros announced with unusual celerity. He stepped into the room holding a ragged bit of something that might once have been cloth—or then again, it might well have been fur, or something else better not dwelled upon. “This is where the smell is coming from.”
Taking his orders from Marella’s disgusted expression, Harros quickly exited the room, taking the offensive odor with him, nor did he return for some minutes. While he was gone, Marella retracted her blade, turning a puzzled eye upon me.
“You know, you did pretty well back there with that staff—but why didn’t you just use the sword? I mean, the quarters were pretty tight—and they were using nets. I may not be much good with a staff, but even if I were I wouldn’t have used it in that situation.”
I had been watching her, and I knew now that she controlled her baton by use of differing hand grips: one made the sword blade extend, another made it retract. Except in these respects, her weapon looked just like my own, and that made me wonder. I held it out and gave her a sheepish grin.
“Actually, I don’t know very much about this thing. I was a librarian before they shanghaied me onto a ship and brought me down here to fight Thorans.”
“You were a librarian?” She cast a glance at Timash. “What was—never mind. You must not have had a whole lot of overdue reading crystals.” Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the staff weapon. “It’s really simple if you know the trick—and it was designed to keep energy weapons out of the hands of the Thorans. Twist like this, and you’ve got a sword; like this, and it’s back to a baton for carrying; like this, and—you’ve got a staff. Here, you try.”
As she had promised, once the basic holds were mastered, it was child’s play to move from one to another configuration, as long as you remembered always to return to the basic “baton” position; you could not switch directly from sword to staff, but with that minor impediment, it was a marvelous close-in weapon—or rather, three weapons. Testing the balance of the two, I quickly learned to prefer the sword over the bulkier staff.
Stepping back, I assumed a fencer’s stance. Although my spoken “En garde,” was incomprehensible to Marella, she immediately took my meaning, and just as quickly set out to take my measure.
There was no flash of blades, no singing on metal slicing off opposing metal: our foils (for such they appeared to me; I later found them to have the strength of sabers) whipped and whispered evilly through the air, sliding off each other with a liquid smoothness that so took me by surprise the first time that I almost impaled myself on Marella’s point. She was on the verge of calling the match, but I waved her on again, concentrating on relinquishing conscious control of my muscles and allowing the Librarian’s tutelage, as well as my own long-ago lessons, to press my suit.
Marella toyed with me at first, but as I gained confidence, I could see the light in her eyes darkening with her own increasing effort, until at length we broke off by mutual consent, sweat staining our clothes anew. I saluted her as no opponent had been saluted in almost a million years, but after a second’s hesitation, she returned my gesture with a shy smile.
Then she laughed. “A librarian. Right.”
I shrugged, embarrassed.
“Uh, Keryl,” Timash interrupted. “Where’s Harros?”
And as seemed to recur with horrific frequency in that city of the dead and dying, we heard a scream in the near distance.
We found Harros in a nearby courtyard, panting and down on one knee, surrounded by four men of the race of our recent adversaries, all dead. A bloody club belonging to one of his late antagonists lay at his side.
“I was looking for a place to bury the rag, and they came at me out of that doorway.” He pointed weakly. “I managed to grab the first one’s club and fight them off.” He paused, catching his breath. “It looked like they were trying to take me alive.”
“Was that one of them that screamed?” Marella asked, eyes darting to and fro. When Harros nodded, she said: “We’d better get moving. There could be more of them.”
As I was to learn, Marella had an almost preternatural habit of being right. As if by magic, every doorway and every overhanging balcony was suddenly crawling with pale and emaciated men. We were trapped like rats.
Even after a relatively short time enjoying their forced hospitality, I was compelled to admit that the Vulsteen were the oddest human beings I had met in two eras. And when you come to realize that I include in my definition of “human beings” an entire city of talking gorillas, that is quite a broad statement.
Notwithstanding that our capture meant the containment of those who had murdered (from their point of view) a number of their fellows, or that it capped a campaign which had commenced with a concerted effort to net Marella and ended with an additional three prisoners, it was with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for victory that they disarmed us and marched us through a maze of dusty tunnels to their home ground. I had been prepared at first to meet my Creator, and even when they made it plain that, as Harros had guessed, they meant to take us alive, I still apprehended the mistreatment to which we might be subject at their hands, most particularly Marella, the abuse of female prisoners being a constant throughout history that I had little hope of having been discontinued before now.
Yet nothing of the like occurred; we were herded in a single line by our unspeaking captors into the subterranean city of the Vulsteen, which to my knowledge has no name, or at least none was ever used in my hearing. Doubtless the inhabitants, a phlegmatic people to say the least, have never perceived the need, since they neither communicate with, nor seek, others outside their own community—except as prisoners, and those rarely.
At first the city itself was as uncommunicative of the life of its people as were they themselves. The Vulsteen were burrowers; generations long dead had been driven underground by their own fear of the thunder lizards and the breen, and by their own lax ambition, too lazy or unimaginative to mount an aggressive defense. This was my assessment of the winding, crudely-hewn halls, frequently broken by finer work where the tunnelers had incorporated existing basements and foundations into their own work.
Then imagine my surprise when, in one of these rocky corridors, I came face-to-face with a mural of surpassing beauty! Red and orange predominated, blazing away from the other, duller hues as though the wall itself had caught fire! And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, half-way up a wall, a few lone streaks trailing away as though all at once the artist had lost interest in his project and simply walked away.
The Vulsteen marched impassively past this startling sight, but my companions, too, stumbled with shock, causing one of our captors to shove Harros in a mechanically nonvindictive fashion. At intervals we came upon more examples of such work, each as passionately emblazoned as the last, yet each abandoned in mid-stroke. And each lay upon the wall of a relatively flat portion of the unfinished tunnels, providing sure evidence that these, our inert guides, sprang from the same loins as the race that had authored those works.
The long march gave me ample time to puzzle over these questions, and at length an answer sprang forth in beautiful simplicity: The men and women who had painfully carved these tunnels many years gone had also been Vulsteen, but even in their decline one among many had retained a spark of mad artistry, one in a thousand who had attempted to arouse in his fellows some grand passion by the expression of what passed, under these distressed circumstances, as great art. The paintings’ abrupt endings bespoke a sudden, grisly end to these brave souls; I could easily believe that the forefathers of the men who had captured us could kill in fear of such grand gestures.
Strange as it might appear, I found this explanation comforting, for it allowed me to categorize my enemies, assign to them a known quantity that might be used in our efforts to escape. Men who would burrow underground rather than fight, kill their own rather than think, these were animals with brains. Marella, Harros—and yes, Timash—and I were brains in the bo
dies of animals. Our inspiration, our courage, would see us quit of these lifeless barbarians—even if we could not count on the Librarian for help, and if the situation warranted, I would not hesitate to reveal even that secret to Harros and Marella.
Thus fortified, I walked with a lighter step, my eyes darting to and fro, taking the measure of the Vulsteen and finding them wanting. Their ingrained societal numbness would prove their Achilles heel. I almost smiled with the irony of it all as I passed yet another mural…
…until I reached the far end and saw the fiery red paint still dripping and wet.
I smelled our destination before I saw it. Here, in a world where the walls literally formed the edges of civilization, every foot of circumscribed space was precious. We did not warrant much. At one end of the “city,” yawned an open pit, whose odor advertised what seemed a community dump and charnel pit.
“Oh my god,” Harros yelped. “They’re not going to throw us in there…?”
Much as we might have deplored the panic with which Harros offered his opinion, we were nonetheless unanimous in our agreement with it. I dug in my heels and the others did the same, but there were far too many Vulsteen pushing, and we tumbled, one by one, into the pit.
It was not the fall that filled me with sudden dread. The bottom of the pit was coated with muck and debris; disgusting as it was, it broke our fall so that none of us was hurt. Nor was it the specter of renewed capture; I had been a prisoner before, and I knew escape would present itself: We had not been herded down here simply to be discarded. When our captors wanted us, we must be ready; that was all.
No, the horror that rushed up to meet us all transcended the mud, and the loneliness, and the smell of the hundreds that had come and gone before us. In the pit it permeated and suffused and overcame all other smells, all other senses.
It was the overwhelming smell of breen. And even before I hauled myself off the ground and looked about, I knew that we were completely surrounded.
Chapter 28
Living with the Man-eaters
We stood stock-still, fully aware of the slippery footing beneath us and the sheer, wet walls that towered twenty feet over our heads. I judged the far end of the pit to be about thirty yards distant, albeit the dim subterranean light made such measurements chancy. But it was no lack of light that made the counting of breen difficult; rather it was their numbers that confused the issue. Still, argued the remaining rational portion of my brain, barricading itself against the primitive caveman pleading to be let out so he could run, run from the sabretooth that had invaded his home—what difference did it make? My entire infantry division would have had little enough chance against these creatures. Ten or a thousand, my companions and I had been dumped into an underground abattoir. The Vulsteen’s use for us had become horribly clear.
The breen stood silently in a loose curving line about ten yards away. Terror stretched out the final seconds of our lives. Would we feel it when those claws and teeth tore through our entrails, or did the breen kill quickly with a swipe across the throat? I wish I could say that I was more concerned for my friends than for myself, that I was tempted to throw my body between that horde and Marella in a doomed attempt at chivalry—but I was not. Even before I came to this world, I had been a soldier, and in the dark, bloody world of war the only way to keep your life was to keep your head down and, yes, sometimes you pray that the whistling sound you hear overhead will end in the body next to yours instead of your own. And to be truthful, the man next to you is hoping the same thing.
And still the breen did not charge us. Even in the adrenaline-flooded attenuation of time that comes with impending death, the seconds still pass. Slowly I came to realize that we had stood thus for a span of moments, unarmed and unprotected, surrounded on three sides by beasts that by all accounts would stand with the shark and the piranha as among the most vicious predators ever to stalk our world—yet still we lived.
I allowed myself to breathe.
A breen broke ranks with his fellows, carefully placing his feet as he walked slowly toward us, outstretched hands ending only in fingers, not claws. I mirrored his action, stepping away from my friends to meet the breen in the center of the cleared space between us. If this were the ceremonial beginning of the kill by a tribal animal, then I was walking to my death—at least then it would be swift—but I thought otherwise. Breen hunted among thunder lizards, but no breen would walk up to a thunder lizard open-handed and alone!
As we approached, it—he—put out his right hand, palm up. I could hear Timash’s breathing behind me. With only a trace of a tremor in my fingers, I reached out and gingerly placed my hand atop the breen’s.
Clasping my hand gently, he smiled—or at least so I took his baring of shark-like fangs to be, for I still lived. My heart was hammering and my face so numb that even an automatic answering smile was beyond my ken. And then he did the most unexpected thing of all.
“Peace,” he said.
It had been surprising but certainly not unpleasant when they led us from the muck of the pit onto dry ground, although the smell attached to our drying clothes (on top of everything else) would remain, our host explained apologetically. Even with the amenities the breen had earned or built for themselves over the generations, washing facilities were unknown. Unlike man, the breen had never incorporated original sin into their rise to intelligence: they wore no clothes. Not that they were dirty; like cats they groomed themselves, and like Timash’s ancestors, they groomed each other as well, but trapped here there was only so much they could do for themselves.
Understandably skeptical at first, my companions had slowly come around to the notion that we were not about to be eaten. The breen were patient with us; they had gone through much the same process with every one of the previous humans who, wandering occasionally into the clutches of the Vulsteen through some great error or accident, had been as unceremoniously tossed in among the great beasts even as had we. When I asked what had befallen them—for there were none but breen here now—our guide explained they had all been done to death by the Vulsteen. Further he would not say.
We were conducted across the pit, quickly discovering that only one area was thick with muck and mire; the rest of the floor had been scraped clean and the debris piled up where the Vulsteen routinely dropped their victims. It seemed an entirely civilized practice for a mob of hairy, naked man-eaters, but there was much to these breen that I had yet to learn.
For example, they did not all live in the pit all the time; they had tunnels and chambers underground, just as their captors. The four of us were even given our own space, a three-walled open room with no furniture, admittedly, but still ours to use. Again, our guide apologized for the cramped quarters, but four prisoners at once was quite rare—most came in singly, survivors of some awful crash, who had fought their way past the thunder lizards and bloodbats of the upper world only to be dragged down here like lost souls into hell. The breen, of course, did not put it that way, but our continuing descent into the bowels of the earth was disquietingly similar to Dante’s. However, since my fellow inmates would not have appreciated the comparison, I was forced to keep it to myself.
What the breen failed to give us was a name: They didn’t have any, another sin that they had avoided, perhaps. Nevertheless, I felt its lack when referring to our guide, who appeared to be chief among them, and so after some thought I took to referring to him as Uncle Sam. Timash and Marella looked upon my announcement as evidence that I was losing my sanity, but Harros seemed to find it amusing, even if he could not have gotten the joke.
We spent our time sitting listlessly in our cell, having explored the limits of our confinement within the first hour. Simple creatures at heart and by necessity, the breens’ rooms were not segregated for separate tasks, as they had few tasks to perform. They wandered freely about, but the only opening in the warren was the pit itself, and there was no escape through the walls. The irregular tunnels were defined by the foundations of the o
riginal buildings above us, and nothing we could bring to bear would even scratch their surface.
The lack of openings meant a lack of air circulation, and the breen-scent hung everywhere. Over the course of what appeared to be several days—we had no means for reliably measuring time save for eating and sleeping—our noses came to accept and ignore it, but even the breen could not stand it forever, any more than we would enjoy living in a locker room. Wandering about the open pit was a favorite pastime that we did well to emulate.
It was during one of these excursions that Harros sought me out. I tried to hide my annoyance, as solitude after a fashion had been my aim; as much as I liked Timash, even we had had too much of each other of late. Still, Harros’ sudden sociability was so entirely unexpected that my irritation was equally balanced by curiosity. Living in that cage had started exceedingly dull, and gone downhill rapidly.
As it turned out, this was the crux of Harros’ conversation.
“Are you bored yet?” he asked with false humor.
I raised my eyebrows. “In this five-star palace? No wants, no needs, room service—” we were fed twice daily a steady diet of mushrooms and tubers grown elsewhere underground— “plenty of exercise and no responsibilities. And I haven’t had a vacation in years!”
He nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, me too.” His eyes darted about, as if seeking someone, and when he didn’t find him, they came back to me. “Uh, seeing as we’re stuck here…”
“I’m sorry about that,” I interrupted. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be here. I should never have brought you along.”
“What, I’d’ve been better off with the conservationists? If they’d known any breen, they’d’ve fed me to them in bite-sized pieces.” He shook his head emphatically. “Uh-uh. I asked to come along. I knew it wasn’t gonna be a picnic. But listen, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to ask you about Marella.”
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 20