by Samuel Fort
Chapter 31: Stranded
The two men sat a few feet apart with their backs propped up against the chamber’s inner block wall, which somehow remained largely intact despite the earthquake. However, concrete block falling from the top row had landed on Ben’s right foot at bad angle as the two men fled the wall during the earthquake.
Vedeus, bruised but otherwise unharmed, inspected the resultant injury and pronounced that his king probably had several fractures, though there were no indications of a broken bone. Though the Peth had stabilized the appendage with a makeshift splint, Ben found the most incidental of movements excruciating. It was only the opiates from the Vedeus’s medical kit that kept the man sane.
“How are you holding up?” he asked Vedeus.
“Not as well as you, Anax. We are buried alive and you are playing solitaire and your digital tablet. I marvel at your indifference to our impending death. I must assume it is the drugs I have given you.”
“I’m reading, Vedeus. This thing didn’t come with solitaire, which is a deficiency I intend to take up with Thal when I get back. On the other hand, I’m getting spectacular battery life. We’ve been using it for light for days and only drained eight percent of its power.”
“Must be lithiums,” mused the other man. “What are you reading?”
“Inscriptions. I’m comparing the ones in here to the ones from the Tiwanaku tablets, and both of those against Thal’s computations.”
Vedeus extended his arms above him and yawned loudly. “Solitaire would be better. How long do you think the air will be breathable?”
“A while,” Ben lied. Changing the subject quickly, he said, “I feel bad for the Peth who died in here. I imagine what happened to our squadron happened to theirs, also. One of the monsters appeared and crawled out of the cave and started chewing people up. When it was clear the thing couldn’t be killed, they fell back to the cave. Some of them, at least. It must have seemed like a good defensive location.”
Vedeus nodded. “It was, until the next creature appeared in their midst. That is what you mean, right? You said this cave is a kind of gateway or portal. This is where the devils come from.”
“That’s right. These poor gentlemen were desperately trying to stop the creature outside from coming in, not knowing that another was manifesting in their midst. It would have been ugly in here.”
“As you say, Anax. Like being tossed into a blender. But a portal? I know you are a wise man. The Great Sage would not have selected you as our king otherwise. Yet what you describe sounds like magic.”
“No, just very sophisticated science. Science we’re not familiar with. Just because we can’t explain what happened doesn’t mean we should deny it happened. We were in the cave before the attack and it was empty. There are no tunnels leading away from it aside from the one leading to the surface. That thing just appeared here, and another was on its way before we destroyed a section of the inscriptions.”
Vedeus grudgingly nodded. “That is true.”
“You would agree with me that the creature we saw was not of this world, right? It came out of nowhere.”
“If this is the exit, where is the entrance? Where are these monsters coming from? What place can be as hideous as that?”
Still staring at the Cicada, Ben said, “I’m not sure if that’s the right question. Instead of asking where they came from, perhaps we should ask when they came from.”
“What do you mean?”
“The stone tablets I study in Steepleguard have a legend attached to them, and part of that legend is that the inscriptions on the tablets, much like the inscriptions on this wall, were used to form a portal. Creatures came through it. Bad-asses, probably like the one we saw earlier. The legend is short on details, but one is that the creatures had a very short life span. Mere seconds. The legend is that they came from a place where time is almost at a standstill. When they rushed into our world, the exploded because of time depressurization. Their material bodies were not suitable for our world. Our time.”
Vedeus, who was growing accustomed to the corpses now, picked up a detached arm and waved it at Ben. “Then what caused this? Why do our monsters not explode?”
Gesturing at the Empyrean on the walls, Ben said, “I believe these etchings have the ability to acclimatize the creatures. Whoever sent them, or is summoning them, has gotten smarter. Instead of ejecting a hundred of these things into our world at once and watching them die, he or she, or them, or it, is now sending one at a time, and giving them time to adjust.”
Vedeus, no idiot, said, “This is a depressurization chamber.”
“As is the temple in Cash. And all the rest.”
“There are more?”
Ben nodded grimly. “There are a lot more, and if Thal’s calculations are correct, many of them are much larger. The ones along the coasts are the largest. If temple size corresponds to creature size…” The man shook his head.
“How big?” asked Vedeus.
Ben sighed. “Titanic. And they may not all be like the one we saw. If they come in different sizes, they probably come in different forms. The thing that came from here might be the monster equivalent of a gerbil.”
“China…”
Ben nodded. “Massive temples. It’s not just the coast of China, though. All the coasts, to include the North American coasts, have numerous temples of similar size. Los Angeles is probably not a great place to be right now. It’s amazing that the larger temples got built without anyone noticing.”
“Good scripts,” suggested Vedeus. “The temples may have started off as hotels or office buildings or covert military facilities.”
“Yeah, but why would the Nisirtu want these things built? The beasts that come from them kill everybody. They wouldn’t be ideal for starting a new civilization.”
“It had to be scripts, Anax. There is no other way to explain their construction without Ardoon knowledge.”
Ben considered this and decided that scripts weren’t the only possible explanation. He could have had a dozen such facilities built by speaking a word of Empyrean to the right people before the apocalypse. Ridley would have been a double threat as both a master of scripts and a speaker of the secret language.
Were there others?