by P. K. Lentz
It was gone by the time Ivar and the rest drew up alongside her.
She stared at the place where the thing had been. She had only glimpsed it for an instant. She must have been mistaken.
“What did you see?” Ivar asked.
Briefly, Arixa considered lying. She knew what her own reaction would be to this truth. But she was Captain, and these men would be wary of mocking her.
In a few breathless words, Arixa told them what she had seen. Without waiting for them to break their stunned silences, she unbent her bow and bounded down the slope.
“Arixa!” Ivar hissed loudly. He cursed in his native tongue, and then Arixa heard branches snap as fierce loyalty sent him after her, even on a course he found foolish.
He was probably right. He definitely was. But Ivar had not seen the dog-man. If he had, he would be leading the way, for who could see such a sight and not give chase?
Arixa reached the spot where the dog-man had vanished behind jutting rocks, but it wasn’t there. She scanned the terrain, which was treacherous. A valley lay ahead. Hardly a step of the passage into it consisted of unbroken ground. The space between trunks in the sparse wood was nothing but naked, uneven rock, worn smooth by time such that any careless step could end in a limb-smashing fall.
Just beyond one of those rocks, a small dark shape caught Arixa’s eye. Without hesitation, she barreled on toward it, leaping from crag to boulder to shallow tree-root, one hand clamped on the shaft of her slung war-pick when she could, to keep it from swinging wildly. She slipped more than once on barren soil and landed hard on her backside before bouncing up to continue without losing speed.
“Arixaaaa!” cried the increasingly distant, echoing voice of Ivar.
But Arixa pressed on, knowing the danger, knowing that this might indeed be one of those monsters of legend who were said to descend from the sky for seemingly no other purpose than to challenge mighty warriors.
Such legends only ever ended with the warrior’s glorious death.
Arixa had no fond desire to die this day, but she couldn’t conceive of a future in which she had not given her all in pursuing this encounter to its ending, whatever it may be.
The dog-man hadn’t struck her as particularly fearsome. Was it possible she was being led into a trap laid by some more formidable creature?
Maybe, but it was equally possible that a monster’s ability to kill men and women should not be judged by its appearance.
While vaulting over a boulder, she took a fleeting glimpse behind her to find that the members of her war band were small, dark shapes high up on the ridge. They were loyal, but hurling oneself down a rocky hill in pursuit of what sounded like a cannabis-dream was a test of any man’s loyalty. Memnon would call their reluctance common sense.
Arixa hoped they would not risk themselves. The further behind she left them, the more convinced she became that this was something for her alone. Those warriors in legends always met their destinies alone.
Of course, she might be destined to climb back up the hill with nothing to show for her efforts. And for many years, behind her back, the story would be told of the time she had chased an invisible, clothed, upright-walking dog...
There!
Fear of humiliation fled as Arixa caught fresh sight of her quarry between some arrow-straight pine trunks, and there was no mistaking it. The thing was fully visible, if for only an instant. She had gained on it, just a little.
“Stop!” she cried out. “What are you!?”
She could hardly move faster than she was, but Arixa managed to by belatedly throwing down her bow and quiver of arrows. Even if this creature gave her the opportunity, she had no intention of sinking an arrow into it. If she needed to defend herself, she had her war-pick, which was also slowing her down. She might have been tempted to discard it were it not for the few seconds delay it would require to do so.
Also, she loved the weapon dearly.
“Wait!”
The thing disappeared again in the rough terrain, which offered a surplus of cover. Even if she looked back, which she was not willing to do, Arixa knew she would no longer see her comrades at all. Fully alone, she plunged on into the deep valley, finally reaching a stretch where the footing was surer. She poured on the speed, frantically scanning ahead for traces of movement.
It was then, perhaps due to overconfidence, that she lost her footing and found herself sliding head-down on a rocky slope far too steep to descend by any unassisted means other than falling. And fall she did, feeling explosions of pain all over her body, one after another, from a dozen impacts. Each time her body met a surface she grasped for purchase and tried to slow or break her fall, only to be denied or have a joint wrenched in a direction the gods had not intended it to move. On one hit, the lesser spike of her war-pick was driven hard into the side of her stomach, piercing armor and flesh.
At some point, though her head still spun, she realized she had come to rest awkwardly on some rocks. Her body was a mass of pain which barely responded to commands to move. Gazing up helplessly at clouds in an azure sky, the sky of Scythia, Arixa wept.
She had written the ending of her legend, after all, that of the princess who had given up the stifling comforts of a palace to build her own war band and lead it to victory after victory in battle, only to accidentally run off a cliff.
It was not a warrior’s death. It was that of an idiot.
She hoped that when her story was told, it might omit the part about the dog.
She managed a faint smile. For all he may enjoy teasing her, Ivar would never let others do so.
With that smile still on her lips and tears drawing tracks down the sides of her broken face, Arixa shut her eyes on the skies of Scythia for a final time.
Two
The city before her was one unfamiliar to Arixa, which was to say it wasn’t Roxinaki. The people crowding its stone-paved streets weren’t Scythian. They were lighter-skinned, and the colorful garments they wore left their arms and legs bare, as if the weather and elements were of no concern.
The structures towering above the people’s heads were also brightly colored, with stout columns of fluted stone supporting fabulously engraved roofs. Among and between the buildings stood vivid likenesses of semi-nude heroes and ornately draped goddesses. Water splashed into mirrored pools from the snouts of stone beasts.
Arixa seemed to look upon this foreign vista from some tower or ledge—she did not know where for she could not turn her head. In a way, there was no need to. It was as though she saw not with eyes at all. With impossible clarity, she saw these unknown folk walking their markets and gardens, trading and bickering, laughing and shouting, running and lazing. She wondered idly who they were and how she had come to be among them.
The sky was as Scythia’s sky, vast and blue and streaked with insubstantial clouds behind which the sun blazed. The day seemed warm, and it must have been judging by the people’s dress, yet Arixa felt no warmth. She was aware of no sensations at all, no body whose limbs she could summon to motion.
The sky darkened. A shadow fell upon the roofs and fountains. The gaily dressed men and women looked up as one at a dark object emerging from the clouds, cleaving them like a sailing ship on the Bleak Sea parts a morning mist.
The object in the sky was oblong in shape, and it grew. And grew. And grew, until Arixa could see that it was itself the size of a city.
Its surface was smooth, mostly, but irregular in places. In no way did it resemble anything natural, like a mountain or an enormous beast. No, this thing had been made by men. Or gods. Much of its surface reflected the ground below, warping the image slightly as water might, or...
Not water. Was it possible that this behemoth was built entirely of metal?
That would require far more metal than all of the swords in Scythia, every stirrup and buckle, every Parthian artifact, every woman’s brooch and hairpin. Even then, Arixa could not imagine it would amount to enough.
Her heart would ha
ve pounded, but she had no chest to contain one. She would have backed away, but she had no legs that were hers to command. She possessed no body, not even any eyes to close, and so it was only her mind that trembled in fear at this overwhelming sight which she had no choice but to witness. She heard the object, too, or rather felt its steady hum in imagined bones: a deep, permeating vibration.
Staring at the behemoth, she began to understand what it must be. This was a vessel, but not of the sea, and not of men.
It was a ship of the boundless heavens and of gods.
From points along the perimeter of the floating object there issued a number of smaller, swifter shapes which soared like eagles in graceful, swooping arcs. As these smaller ‘skyboats’ descended upon the streets and temples of the city, Arixa better discerned their outlines. They were boxy and lacked wings. Green discs glowed brightly on their undersides.
Many of the city’s inhabitants began to scream. Some ran. Others prostrated themselves wherever they happened to stand. Shrill horns of warning sounded, but they were as the buzzing of gnats before the great hum of the god-ship overhead.
When they had reached a height barely above the highest roofs, the skyboats began to deploy a yellowish substance upon the streets, particularly over the largest congregations of men and women. Arixa thought for a moment that it must be meant to kill, some sort of poison which the gods threw down on men, as farmers might poison vermin.
Then she saw her mistake. This yellow substance was no lethal weapon but an ensnaring one, like a fisher’s net or a spider’s web. On reaching the ground, the liquid solidified to form a clinging prison for whomever it touched.
After each craft’s passage, what had been a mob running for its collective life was rendered a single, translucent yellow mass in which individuals were embedded as bugs in amber or nuts in a festival loaf.
Once these skyboats had criss-crossed the city, trapping clusters of its people, they turned and circled back, flying lower. A door opened in the rear of each blocky vessel and thin arms of metal emerged. Bands sprang from the ends of the arms, coiled around one end of the yellow cake, from which jutted a head or a leg here, half a man there, and began to hoist them into the air and toward the ship’s waiting open hatch.
The masses of snared men and women were pulled into the ship like dough into an oven, and then the hatches shut while the craft moved into position to consume another.
The ships went about collecting like this for some time. As the bellies of each craft became full, it returned to the god-ship above.
A great many men and women yet remained in the city. Some still ran, screaming or not, while others vanished, seeking refuge inside homes and temples. In any case, the number taken by the skyboats could represent only a small proportion of this great city’s inhabitants.
When the last of the skyboats had disappeared again, small red discs flared to life near the edges of the huge god-ship.
Wide beams flashed down toward the city. Wherever they touched, men and women simply dropped to the ground, dead, their flesh smoldering until the corpses were withered husks wrapped inside clothing that remained pristine. Likewise the streets and walls, anything which was not flesh, remained intact and undamaged. The beams swept left and right over the whole of the city and its periphery, eradicating all who had managed to avoid ensnarement.
The horror on display was sufficient to crush the stoutest of hearts. No man or woman could look upon this sight and fail to shriek, or flee, or pray, or vomit from fear, or some combination thereof. Yet Arixa was given no choice but to watch. With neither stomach to empty nor eyelids to shut tight, she witnessed a city far finer than Roxinaki reduced to empty streets and wailing spirits.
The god-ship’s red beams winked out, but it was not yet finished. Near the center of the impossible metal hull, an array of white lights appeared, and from them lanced beams of blazing fury like a hundred bolts of lightning entwined. Where they struck, fires erupted with explosive force, splitting open the roofs of temples, collapsing walls, turning stone-paved avenues into pits of blackened gravel.
Like the diffuse red beams before, these more focused and brilliant rays of white swept back and forth across the city, etching trails of total devastation. On and on the bright lances danced, roving from neighborhood to neighborhood until everywhere fires burned and nothing was left. Where mere minutes ago had stood a glorious city, now hardly two stones remained stacked upon one another.
By now Arixa’s desire to give vent to terror by screaming, by sobbing, by burying head in arms and never emerging, verged on overwhelming. But it was not to be, for she was only a bodiless spirit.
She was... dead.
She had fallen. Her body was smashed. The memory of it dwelt just out of reach.
With unblinking eyes, Arixa watched the god-ship withdraw into the sky, the clouds absorbing its massiveness as sunlight was restored to a freshly wrought ruin.
* * *
As a nearly drowned man finally breaking the surface of a lake, Arixa gasped for air. Her limbs, too, flailed as frantically as a drowning man’s.
But her eyes, suddenly wide open, told her she was not drowning. This was no sea or lake. No water filled her mouth and nose or slowed her wild movements, which she promptly ceased.
Neither did she gaze upon any sight that matched either of her last, fleeting, mismatched memories: of a city annihilated, of a bone-breaking fall.
Panting, she sat upright on a yielding surface, like a moss bed. But this was no forest. All around were smooth surfaces that gleamed.
Seeing a hint of dark movement at the edge of her vision, Arixa turned her head—and she screamed.
Staring back were a pair of wide, black, reflective eyes set in a face coated in gray-brown fur. Its nose was black, with wide nostrils set at the end of a blunt snout, and the mouth under it was a dog’s mouth full of canine teeth set in glistening purple gums. Its ears were stiff and protruded upward half again the height of its head. Around its neck were waves of still thicker fur hanging down over the collar of its clothing—clothing—which was blue and white with sleeves down to the furry elbows.
Faced with the nearness of something which should not exist, Arixa’s body acted clumsily and of its own accord to put distance between her and it. The attempt sent her tumbling backward off of the waist-high platform on which she belatedly realized she was perched. Some of her instincts must have remained intact, for she partly broke her fall with one arm.
While falling, she realized she was still screaming. She also realized she was naked.
Both revelations were equally embarrassing, but only the first was in her power to quickly remedy. She did so by shutting her mouth.
Regaining her feet, she looked across her former perch, a soft-topped table of sorts, at none other than the dog-like creature which she had recently chased to her—
Death.
It raised its right hand, which was not like a dog’s paw but comprised of a palm with three fingers and a thumb. Its left hand gripped a slender white cylinder with intricate markings lining its smooth surface.
When the dog-man stepped closer and raised the object menacingly, still more instincts took over Arixa’s body. She leaped over the table, reaching out to catch the wrist of the thing’s left hand before it could bring the weapon to bear.
Instincts may have been present. Agility was not. Her limbs felt thick and sluggish. Instead of reaching her target, she ended up draped over the thin table on her belly, her fingers having barely brushed fur.
The dog-man touched his wand to her shoulder, and all became black.
* * *
She awakened on her back with a feeling of ease and well-being pervading mind and flesh, as when one has inhaled just enough cannabis vapor, but not too much. She drew deep breaths and blinked her eyes to focus. The sight that met them was that of a smooth, polished surface broken by clean lines and perfectly etched circles.
Even though this was a strange and fear-insp
iring sight, she remained strangely at ease. She tried to move her arms, then her legs, and found she could not. Even that revelation failed to shatter her calm. A light dent, perhaps, as she realized she was at the mercy of...
Who?
Those gods who had destroyed a city and scooped up its people in scores?
That particular thought did manage to speed the beating of Arixa’s heart with mild panic.
“Be welcome, Arixa,” someone very near said in accented Scythian.
She tried to angle her head toward the speaker. Though her other muscles weren’t currently obeying, that worked.
She realized that this was the same room in which she had spilled naked onto the floor. Once again, she was not alone, but her company had changed.
Man, not dog-man.
She was pleased to find herself clothed, even if it was only in a sort of linen shift.
“Do not be afraid,” the man said. “Bodily control will return to you shortly. Considering your earlier reaction, we thought it a wise precaution. We mean you no harm, and you are unlikely to accomplish any against us.”
The man was smallish of frame, smooth of complexion, and neatly groomed with a pointed black beard that matched his short, gloss-black hair. He wore a long-sleeved, tailored garment of black and gray with no ornamentation. Arixa had never seen such garments, in or outside of Roxinaki.
“I don’t...wish harm,” Arixa said with some difficulty. Her jaw, much like her mind, felt more relaxed than was ideal for conversation.
The man smiled. “I believe you, Arixa. You saw something outside the confines of your accepted reality. Rather than fleeing or trying to destroy it, as most would, you let the desire for knowledge drive you, unless I’m mistaken. A rare quality, and in a warrior, no less.”
“You know... my name.”
“We have our ways. None of which are needed when your comrade is kind enough to shout your name repeatedly in the vicinity of a being with quite large and sensitive ears.”
“The dog...”
“Indeed, he does resemble a dog. Dr. Fizzbik was enjoying a walk when you elected to give chase. He felt quite badly when he saw you fall. He turned back to check on you, and finding you clinging to life, he fetched you to our shuttle and repaired you. You’ll find you are rather better off than you were when you arrived. For one, you had a tumor in your breast which would have killed you before you reached thirty. Had you not broken your skull and spine first, that is.”