Legacy of Shadow

by Gallant, Craig;

  His glittering eyes narrowed as he realized it would all come down to this. It was a race, his Ntja against the Human. And although he had no idea what they were racing toward, he had no doubts about one thing: everything for which he had struggled was now at risk.

  *****

  They followed the narrow passage further and further into the substance of the Relic Core. The lighting continued to follow their descent, reminding her of the service corridors receiving Marcus upon his arrival in Penumbra.

  The light here was a soft yellow with just a touch of green, and reminded her of light filtered through the leaves of some great forest high overhead. Even the air seemed clearer here, and there was no sign of the dust and deterioration that had marked the first few paces of the entrance tunnel.

  There was no sound of pursuit; the clash of battle had faded away soon after they had turned to run. She could hear her own breathing echoing in her ears, and the others were not much better off.

  Master Nhan looked stricken, still leaning against her as if incapable of holding himself upright. His mouth writhed like he was delivering some impassioned harangue, but no sound escaped his lips. She grimaced, hitching up her grip on his arm, and tried to move faster. Having a friend sacrifice herself for you was one thing, and would be hard enough. But the anger and indictment in Sihn Ve’Yan’s eyes as she had turned away to throw herself into the battle would haunt Angara for a long time, she knew. And Ve’Yan had not even been directing her hatred at her!

  A slight change in the atmosphere around them brought her out of the dark reveries, and she paused to look around them. The walls had darkened, and here they widened out, doubling the width of the corridor. Some irregularities marked the walls ahead, flat objects to either side, and as they approached, she felt her brow furrow in confusion.

  They were images. She thought they might be paintings at first, but as she came up even with Marcus, who had stopped to stare, she saw that they appeared to be built into the walls themselves. Mosaics, maybe? Or some kind of sculpture …

  But as she slowed to a halt before them, looking more closely, the subjects of the two images were far more interesting than their composition.

  In each image, several Humanoid figures stood upon a horizon, looking upward. The details were sparse, and they could have been nearly any of the countless races known as the Children of Man. In each image, the skies over the figures were marred with stylized visions of warfare. There was almost no way that warships in orbit would be visible at this scale, but the basic shapes, and the slashes of beam weapons, were unmistakable.

  Marcus turned away from the images to look a mute question at her. She shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  And yet there was something about the figures, standing there looking up at the sky, that made her uneasy. Something about the way they stood, or the set of their shoulders, seemed to hint at emotions or intentions that struck her as ominous for reasons she could not articulate.

  With a gruff sound, Marcus pushed on down into the gloom. After a moment Angara moved off after him, nudging Nhan before her.

  She had seen lights popping off and on for Marcus before, but for some reason this time she felt a growing unease. As each bar overhead faded into luminescence, and as each one faded away into the darkness behind them, she knew they were being watched; that somewhere nearby something was marking their movement. She could not shake off the feeling that whatever entity was following their progress, it was not her friend.

  They came to several junctions as they moved. Each time the lights above all the available corridors would brighten. She had no idea how Marcus was choosing their path, but he hardly hesitated at each intersection, and as soon as he began to move down a new hall, the lights in the side passages dimmed just like those behind them.

  Something was guiding the Human, or facilitating his advance. Her head constantly pivoted from side to side as she tried to open all of her senses to their surroundings. The deeper they moved, the heavier the air seemed. The feeling that they were under constant observation would not be shaken, and she checked that her knives were loosened in their sheaths.

  Somehow, she knew that she would not be allowed to use her energy weapons within the Relic Core.

  Even Khet Nhan was responding to the pressure. He had come out of his depression enough to take an interest in their surroundings, and judging by the way his wide red eyes scanned the shadows around them, he felt no more at his ease here than she did.

  They came to several more images on the walls, and in each one Humanoid figures were transposed with fiery depictions of violence and war. And again, as she looked at each image, those figures troubled her. She looked down to Nhan when they passed their fourth set, and saw that the little Thien’ha was fascinated, staring up at the pictures with his mouth open and his eyes wide. She wanted to ask him what he was seeing, but something about the silence around them stopped her from speaking.

  Her head jerked up at that thought, and she craned her neck back the way they had come. The silence had suddenly become more brittle, as if it threatened to shatter at any moment. Did she hear pursuit, soft and distant? She thought she could almost hear the clang of metal, the guttural mumblings and yelpings of Ntja soldiers hounding them down into the depths. As she focused, the sounds became louder, more distinct. It was easy to forget, here in the cool darkness, that they were fleeing from crushing defeat and certain death.

  “Come on.” Marcus muttered, and moved off. Angara was still looking behind her, but when the light over her head snapped off, threatening to leave her in darkness, she hurried to catch up.

  The sounds behind them, whatever they had been, had disappeared with his words.

  Angara found herself moving closer to Marcus as they descended, and noticed that Nhan was doing the same. Whatever she sensed pressing in around them, he obviously felt something similar.

  Marcus, however, continued to move with a purpose he did not share with them. His footsteps were clear, echoing dully off distant, unseen walls. If anything, he was moving faster now than when they first braved the hall behind the mysterious door. He was walking as if driven forward by some force she could not feel.

  Unless it was the force she felt all around her, watching them from the shadows.

  She was ready to scream by the time the corridor opened out into a wide chamber around them. It seemed to emerge from the darkness as lights pulsed into life along the ceiling and embedded within support columns standing out from the walls. A vibration shook the air; a sound just beneath her ability to hear, or a pulsating power just out of sight. It did nothing for her peace of mind, and she wondered if the others sensed it too.

  The chamber was empty, the walls featureless dark metal except for the raised pillars and the glowing beams within. Between each pair of columns was a large mosaic, similar to the others except in scale and scope. Each of these portrayed enormous crowds of figures, and in each, a lowering sky threatened them with bolts of brilliant lightning. She felt like there was some symbolism at work that was beyond her understanding, but she could not pull her gaze away from the figures themselves, who still filled her with a formless dread.

  It was not a huge room, probably similar in size to the control center in the distant Red Tower. The high-ceilinged hallway ended here, and a big, heavy-looking door sealed the only visible exit on the far wall. Marcus moved forward more slowly now, as if in a trance, and barely spared a glance to any of the images as he stalked past. He walked to the door set into the center of the opposite wall, and when it failed to open for him, he stopped, staring up at it like a small, disappointed child.

  “Won’t it open?” Khet Nhan moved to Marcus’s side, staring at the door as well; the weight of mystery and menace drawing him out of his melancholy.

  Marcus looked down at the little mystic, his head jerking from side to side. “No.”

  Angara glanced back the way they had come. Was she imagining those sounds again? Then she join
ed them in the center of the strange room. “There’s got to be some way to open it. It would not have brought you this far with no way to move forward.”

  He looked at her, a dimple deepening the shadows of one stubbled cheek. “It?”

  She shrugged, gesturing toward the glowing medallion on his chest. “I’m assuming the Skorahn is to thank for our continuing escape?”

  He looked down as if he had forgotten the gem. The design floating just beneath the surface was darker than it had been, the ‘X’ more pronounced. She had no idea what it might be, but there was no doubt that the image was resolving.

  The feeling that gave her was a stark reminder of the sensation she had, looking at the mosaics.

  Marcus lifted the glowing medallion with one hand, looking deeper into the stone. Then he looked back at her, down to Khet Nhan, and then back to the door. He moved toward it with hesitant steps as if expecting it to open at any moment. It did not, and when he finally reached the door, he looked back at them, then turned, dropped the medallion back onto his chest, and placed both of his hands upon the door. He lowered his head a few degrees, and his shoulders rolled as he began to push slightly upon the metal.

  Without a sound, it slid up into the low ceiling.

  A brighter light, still with the same greenish cast, fell into the small antechamber where they stood. The sensation of power grew, the low rumble becoming more distinct. Marcus lowered his hands, straightened, and then stepped into the new room without looking back.

  Angara felt herself being drawn forward, and decided not to fight it. Nhan moved forward beside her. Whatever happened to them in this mysterious chamber deep beneath the surface of Penumbra, at least she would not be alone.

  *****

  After the dim lighting in the corridor, Marcus wanted to squint as he peered into this new chamber. Whatever had been pulling him along through the halls had died away when he had entered the antechamber outside, but now that he had reached out once again to whatever it was, the feeling had surged with the opening of this door; this door that he felt certain in his bones was the last.

  The room on the other side of the door was much larger. The ceiling soared up into shadows, and he could not have said with any certainty what the source of the light might be. Enormous shapes hung down from above, with pipes, tubes and wires dangling farther still. Three gigantic pillars rose up from the floor and joined the shapes in the dark. Wide, softly glowing bars of green light providing the only illumination to those upper areas.

  There was a heavy feeling to the cool air, as if everything was vibrating. A deep thrum of power dominated it all, almost too potent to experience on a conscious level. The air was cool and fresh, nothing like the musty closeness he had anticipated. He felt like the chamber existed on more than one level; there was the empty, quiet room he occupied, but there was also a bustling, surging power present just below the surface.

  The walls were a metal honeycomb of large, spherical hollows that reminded him of viewing fields, now shadowy and dark. Between each set of hollows was a deep alcove buried in shadow, and within those shadows loomed enormous Humanoid figures that seemed to watch them from the darkness. There was no other ornamentation, no mosaics or other statues; only those huge sculptures, standing guard across the long, lost millennia.

  He shook himself and went back to the hollows. As he looked at them he saw a sort of sense to the layout of the room, separated into distinct areas by the placement of the fields and the shapes hanging from above. There seemed to be an open space before each cluster of hollows, and the image of a group of beings standing in that space, watching images flicker within the hollows, flashed in his mind.

  In the center of the room a series of metal steps led up to a platform about five feet off the ground. More pipes and hoses were gathered around the sides of the platform, feeding into it and down into the floor. A few of them dropped down from the ceiling, connecting the platform to the mysteries above. And upon the platform itself was the only piece of recognizable furniture in the entire chamber. An elaborate metal seat was placed there, umbilicals dangling from it and connecting to the platform itself.

  It was a massive chair, more than eight feet tall and four feet wide. The back swept up into a leaf shape that housed a huge jade plaque marked with a symbol that at first did not register in his mind. He stared at it, his eyes narrowing, and a shiver shot through his body as his blood ran cold with sudden recognition.

  Two stylized swords crossed before what might have been a rounded helmet, tilted downward as it regarded the viewer with enigmatic, empty eyes.

  He grabbed the medallion and held it up. The symbol was there, as clear as if it had been there all along. The swords, the helmet, all sharply defined and unmistakable.

  “They’re the same.” Angara murmured, looking over his shoulder and then back up at the colossal seat.

  “The same.” Nhan appeared to agree, but it was hard to tell exactly what he was talking about as he stood at the base of the platform, his shoulders slumped and his eyes wide, staring up at the green plaque high above him.

  Marcus shook it off and looked around again. There were flickering lights here or there around the chamber, and the thrum deep in the air definitely gave the sense of potential power permeating the room. But other than those lights and the presence of the cool, clean air, nothing seemed to have acknowledged their presence in any way.

  Angara moved away to pace along the edges of the room, looking up into the hollows, while Nhan remained, standing stock still at the bottom of the dais.

  No matter what he did or thought, there was no response from the vast room. His eyes kept drifting back to the giant chair, but then he would turn away, shaking his head. Something about the thing was weighing heavily on his mind, and he was developing a desperate desire not to sit on it.

  Angara, having circled the big chamber and returned to the wide door, stopped, her head cocked toward the outer room, and then turned to him.

  “I think they’re coming, Marcus.” Her face was calm considering the implications of her words. If they were caught down here, helpless and alone, there was no way they would survive to see the surface again. Taurani would never give them another chance to escape.

  He went to the door and peered out into the shaded exterior room. He wasn’t sure if the thrumming in the air was stronger than it had been, but it was definitely keeping him from differentiating any sounds that might be coming at them from down the long metallic corridors. In fact, as Angara turned to speak to him, he found that he had to concentrate to hear even her, standing by his side.

  “I’m sorry, what?” He tried to force his attention through the thick air, but it was getting harder and harder.

  She gave him an exasperated look and shook her head, but repeated what she had said. “We need to do something, Marcus.” She gestured to the room around them. “This is a control center of some kind, like the one in the Red Tower. Can you not get any of this equipment to respond? It does not appear to lack for power.”

  He shook his head, his own eyes raking across the hollows in the walls again. “I’m not getting any sense of connection with anything here. But there’s something…”

  Nhan shook himself out of his trance and lifted his voice to be heard over the deep humming. “You know what you have to do, Marcus Wells. You know where you must go.” He gestured up to the chair. “Hesitate now and we are all lost.”

  The haunted look in his eyes that had faded during their descent was back. “Our path narrows, our choices are gone.” He pointed up the stepped dais. “All of our actions and choices have led to this. You must take your rightful place.”

  He shook his head, the dread rising. “No.” His head vibrated back and forth. “Not me. Why not one of you?”

  Angara’s eyes were narrow as she looked back at the little mystic, and then she stalked past him, up onto the dais, and stood before the chair itself. Whatever she saw there stopped her, and she stood, elbows slightly bent
as if ready to fight, staring at the seat itself.

  Her lithe body seemed almost clumsy as she turned to look down at Marcus. “It needs to be you.” She spoke as if in a trance, or emerging from a sudden and profound realization.

  “Why, because of the Skorahn?” He slipped it over his head, willing to do anything to avoid taking the chair. “Here, take it!” He held it up, dangling from its chain and taking on a richer sapphire flare from the sourceless green illumination all around. “I don’t want it! Take it, sit your ass on the damned throne, and let’s get out of here!”

  She stared at him, a strange sorrow shadowing her eyes. He looked at Nhan, and saw the sadness in his eyes as well.

  “It cannot be us, Marcus.” She shook her head, gesturing around them, then back to the antechamber. “This does not belong to us. It does not belong to any of us. It belongs to you.”

  The words made no sense. Even as the Administrator of Penumbra, he didn’t own any part of the city. Hell, he didn’t own anything! He shook his head, a cloud rising up in his mind that shadowed the implications of her words.

  “Please.” He begged her, his voice soft. The medallion fell as he lowered his arm. “I don’t want to.”

  “You must, Marcus.” Nhan was beside him, guiding him gently to the dais. “There is no one else. This journey is yours and yours alone.”

  He couldn’t remember going up the steps, but suddenly he was standing taller than he remembered, looking down at the shadowy shapes around him. The chair was even larger standing before it, and as he looked down, he saw that the size had been misleading. Clearly crafted into the material of the chair, hidden within the recess for a titanic host, was a shape intended to sit a single being. A single, averaged-sized Human being. It shouldn’t have meant anything. There were countless races he had seen in his time in Penumbra that would have fit equally well in the seat; including all the various Children of Man.

  The Children of Man. They would fit in that seat. But it was not meant for them. The cloud in his mind parted completely, and his own eyes widened. The chair was not meant for the Children of Man, or for any of the other myriad species who had risen to dominance across the galaxy. It was meant for Man. And Man alone.