by Conner, Jack
At last the Ale-Maru smashed onto a tangle of debris that had already fallen, including the former tower, and rolled down the rough incline created by this mound to plough into the cistern lake with a loud hiss. Steam rose from the impact. It bobbed once, then again, and with each bob Tavlin nearly vomited.
Still gripping the structure, he glanced up to see that Sophia was already standing and surveying the scene about them. There was no sign of the G’zai. Carried by the force of its impact, the Ale-Maru, buoyed up by the large air pockets of its many shops and dwellings, drifted farther out into the lake, away from the city. If it sank, it would sink very slowly.
The city burned. Tears stung Tavlin’s eyes as he watched it go, as he saw the green flames dancing on the cistern water. Around him the occupants of the Ale-Maru began to crawl out, dazed and sore, from their burrows. Some clutched broken arms or bleeding heads. Doubtless some had worse injuries, or had not made it at all. But most of them lived. If they had not fallen, they would have all died.
“We’re stuck,” Tavlin said.
Indeed, they were marooned on the Ale-Maru.
“Speak for yourself,” Sophia said. “I can survive the water.”
“You wouldn’t ... The water, it’s …”
She smiled at him. Without another word, she dove off the side and into the so-called water, vanishing into its murky depths. He stared after her for several minutes, not quite believing it. After all that, and she had left him without a word goodbye. Well, he should have figured as much. She could bear him no love. Not after everything he’d said. He deserved to be marooned.
He was surprised when he heard the sound of a small motor a few minutes later and looked up to see Sophia approaching the drifting Ale-Maru on a boat presumably liberated from the Taluushan docks.
“Climb on,” she said.
He did, saying nothing about her smell. The other survivors watched them, but none asked to leave with them. They were too busy watching the city burn.
“Where to?” Sophia asked.
“Away,” Tavlin said.
As they motored off, he turned back one last time and stared as green fire engulfed the towers of Taluush. Even as he watched, another tower collapsed, and strange green sparks flashed high into the air, frying the flail nests plastered against the distant cistern ceiling.
Chapter 8
For a long time, Tavlin didn’t know how long, they drifted, aimless, through the high, dark halls of the sewers, guided only by the steadily fading lamp that had been in the boat. Tavlin shone the lamp while Sophia steered. They didn’t speak, just put physical and mental distance between themselves and the ruins of Taluush. The boat’s motor sounded very loud in the stillness, but Tavlin barely heard it over the beating of his heart and the preoccupation of his brain. He could still hear the roar and grind of the town collapsing. The sounds seemed to chase him.
At last she said, “It’s hard to believe all those people died just because the G’zai wanted the location of the briefcase.”
He nodded guardedly. “They wanted me. The Octunggen couldn’t find me and they didn’t want to waste any more time trying, so they contacted the G’zai.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. Why would the G’zai have anything to do with them? They don’t like uninfected humans. They only deal with us because we’ve been touched by the Atomic Sea. They think we’ve transcended humanity.”
Tavlin shrugged. “The Octunggen seem able to befriend the old races. I remember in Muscud, at the factory, they had Suulm working with them.”
“Suulm! Here?”
“One tried to kill me.”
“It’s going around.” She cast him a glance as if to say she might have caught it.
“So,” he said, “the way it must have gone down, they contacted the G’zai and asked them to find the uninfected humans of my general description—that’s if we’re not all the same to them—and not to worry about any collateral damage. Maybe the Octunggen promised to give them a hundred-year supply of the chemicals the Taluushians were feeding them, or maybe it was a religious decision—the Octunggen are supposed to worship strange gods; maybe it’s the same as the G’zai—who knows? Anyway, the G'zai agreed to serve Octung, or at least work with them.”
She studied him, and there was a long silence broken only by the chug of the motor. Tavlin wondered how much gasoline was left. Finally she said, “They tore the whole town apart, killed countless people, to find you. Whatever you know, it might be more dangerous—for the enemies of Octung—for you to be alive than dead.”
“You still saying it would’ve been better if I’d died?”
In a small voice, she said, “Prove me wrong.”
Again they lapsed into silence for a time, until finally she asked, “Who was that ... woman, if that’s what she was? Girl, really. That thing?”
He whistled. “Hell if I know, darlin’. I’m kind of glad you saw her.”
“You’re alone there.”
“I’d begun to think I was imagining her. I don’t know who she is, or where she comes from. She just appears, generally at an inconvenient moment, and takes ten years off my life every time. Thank the gods for alcohol, or I wouldn’t have slept a wink the last couple days. Which reminds me, I’m about due for a nap.” His blood was still racing too fast though, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Perhaps some booze ...
“What’s that?” Sophia had cocked her head.
“What’s what?” He didn’t hear anything.
“Listen.”
He strained his ears. Still nothing. He picked out some of the bits and pieces that had stuck in his ear canal and flicked them over the side. Either because of that or the closing of the distance, he began to hear noises. At first he wasn’t sure what they were exactly. They sounded ominous, yet sweet, harmonious … grand ...
“Singing,” he whispered. “Music.”
She nodded, said nothing, and he realized he had the desire to be silent, too, as if the only thing he wanted to do in this world was to listen to that wonderful, unearthly singing. Perhaps unconsciously, Sophia steered the boat toward the sounds, and they grew louder, magnified by the tight, slime-grown corridors all around them. Some of the mutated lichen, which could absorb and emit sounds, provided a chilling counter-note.
Sophia shut off the motor and grabbed an oar. Tavlin rowed from the other side, wood rasping into his torn hands, but he barely felt it. The music consumed him. Together he and Sophia rowed toward it in silence, down one hall and then another.
Soon they entered a corridor filled with slugmines. Tavlin came to himself enough to recognize the place where he had stolen the briefcase, where he had killed those men. And yes, there was the boat, still resting against the stone wall where he had left it. Little was left of the mutants he had killed except bones, he saw, and there weren’t many of those. The creatures of the sewer, their situation notwithstanding, wasted nothing. A few blood-red crab-things, overgrown with green, luminescent barnacles, scrambled amongst a ribcage. A black, oily eel slithered out of one eye socket and into the other. That was it.
“They said someone was coming to meet them,” Tavlin said, as he and Sophia carefully rowed around the bone-filled boat and even more carefully avoided contact with the dark, slimy mounds of the slugmines.
“Who?” Sophia asked, also in a whisper. She spoke as if in a dream. In the distance, the singing continued.
“The thugs the Octunggen had hired. The briefcase, the container, they were taking it somewhere, I don’t know where. One of the Octunggen went with them. He’s who I took the briefcase from.” Something occurred to him. “I think I know the way back from here. Back to Muscud ...”
She nodded, sleepily. “Yes, we’ll go to Muscud ... but first ...”
He nodded, feeling a pleasant numbness. “The singing ...”
They rowed forward, through the tunnel of the slugmines, then into a wider thoroughfare. All the while the singing increased in volume, bouncing
around the thick walls of the underworld with mighty echoes that seemed staggered somehow, complimented by the slapping of the waves against the boat’s hull. At last Tavlin and Sophia rowed past a high archway and into a massive chamber, and Tavlin’s entire world changed.
The chamber was grand, as grand or grander than the one Taluush occupied, but it was not filled with the junkheap bulks of an undercity but something far more lovely, far more unexpected. It was, and there could be no mistake, a temple. A great, soaring temple, all of white, with graceful, bone-thin columns that soared up and up, through the high spaces of the cavern chamber, to a great dome overhead. It was construction on a scale that beggared belief, something that almost looked as if it had come from the ancient L’ohen Empire, noted for its awesome buildings, many of which still stood today. But the architecture here had a different quality. It was more subtle. More unearthly. Ghostly, even. And the angles and facets of wall and column seemed somehow wrong. They made Tavlin’s eyes itch to look at. And yet he couldn’t tear his gaze away.
At the sight, he gasped, and beside him he heard Sophia suck in a breath as well. Unthinking, they clutched hands. Tavlin felt something rise inside him, something sweet and pure—something longing. He rowed toward the temple with an almost painful urgency.
Ahead of him, the structure glowed.
Luminous, shining, its columns emitted a pale white light, as if carved from mutated fungi, but they were clearly not fungi. They were strong as granite, maybe steel. And the dome they supported glowed as well. But it was what lay within the temple that threw radiant white light across the water and drove back the hovering blackness. Something huge and white and splendid loomed beyond the pillars, within the temple's walls, and its light shone from the many great doorways, windows and balconies, seeming even to glow from the walls themselves. It looked as if there were pools, areas where worshippers could come and go from the water, and of course there was a boat dock, but even this was beautiful, if rudimentary—but eclipsing all of it, every bit, was the huge glowing brightness that emanated from the center of the temple, not visible, exactly, but still felt.
The light sort of glimmered, shifted. One moment it shone as bright as day, the next barely dusk. When it faded, Tavlin felt the breath suck from his lungs, and the sweet pureness welling up inside him dwindled. Then, gloriously, it would return.
And all the while, the singing. It crashed from wall to wall, throbbing in Tavlin’s ears like a second heartbeat—like a first. He glanced to the side to see the sheen of the glorious light hitting Sophia’s face, making her eyes sparkle, making all the years and all the stress fall away from her. She looked in that moment as she had when he’d first met her, turning men’s heads at the Twirling Skirt all those years ago, the light of the night, the fire in his brain. She was lovely. He squeezed her hand, and she turned to look at him. Their gazes caught, and they allowed their eyes to linger on each other. Her smile grew smaller, but somehow deeper. She said something, he couldn’t hear it, but he knew it was Tavlin. He said her name back.
They renewed rowing, toward the light, toward the life. The singing continued, pulsing in waves from up ahead. From the temple. Tavlin began to see shapes, small but many: the temple’s worshippers. They congregated in organized groups on the platforms and balconies, all gazing toward the inner workings of the temple, at the splendor of the shining light. Tavlin thought he recognized one of them from the docks of Muscud. Others worked on the temple itself, some sort of construction. They clambered about on the pillars up high, making their way along scaffolding that Tavlin was just beginning to see. They appeared to be installing windows of unusual design between the pillars in neat rows. Where the light shone through it, it turned slightly greenish, but still beautiful, an amazing green-white flood of holy illumination.
Tavlin and Sophia rowed closer. Singing filled Tavlin’s mind. He found himself wanting to run across the water toward it. Wanted to bask in the light. Soon, he thought. Soon. Then he and Sophia would be one with the light. One with the light ... one with ... one ... they would be one ... one ...
He shook his head. Something was wrong.
The singing electrified him. It filled him, pulsed through him, inside him. He was the music.
The light inside the temple faded, as it had been doing, sort of flickered—although softer than a flicker, more a pulse—and he was able to shake himself loose of the dream, just for an instant. Frantically, he began rowing again, this time paddling the water in reverse. Combined with the forward motion of Sophia’s oar, this movement swung the boat around to face the opposite way.
Sophia looked at him as if he were mad. She was facing the other way now, and the light only picked out a highlight here and there, the gleam off one eye, off her high, full cheek, off one perfect set of gills. But he could tell from her tone what she felt.
“What ... are you doing?”
He gunned the motor. His motions were fear-fueled. At any moment the brightness would return, and the singing would fill him once more. He didn’t think he would have the strength to resist a second time.
The motor roared, and he shot off toward the halls that led away from the temple chamber.
“No!” Sophia said. “You’re ... you’re ... leaving it!” She lifted her oar out of the water, rose and turned toward him, where he crouched over the motor. She raised her oar as if to strike him with it.
He tensed, trying to decide whether he should duck or busy his attention with aiming the boat away from the wall it was currently barreling toward. He and Sophia locked eyes. Water dripped from her oar.
The light filled her face again now that she was turned, and he saw the anguish there, the pain, the confusion. Then something rippled, and the old Sophia returned: tough, stubborn, obstinate. She staggered back. The oar dropped to the floor. She glared—glared; it was rage she felt now, he could tell, and felt a swell of pride—over Tavlin’s shoulder, toward the temple. He heard her gasp as she sank down beside him.
The light pulsed strong again.
Tavlin guided the boat into a tunnel, and darkness, wonderful, beautiful darkness, swallowed them once more.
Clutching his arm, Sophia whispered in a small, horrified voice, “What would have happened if we had gone into the light?”
*
They set off toward Muscud. For a long time, they said little that was sensible, just fear-filled mutterings of awe and fear. Both trembled. Tavlin retched over the side, but Sophia, staring blankly, didn’t seem to notice. From time to time they clutched at each other for comfort, but they were hardly aware of this either.
At last, as the sound of boats ahead, the sign of civilization, came to his ears, Tavlin was able to master his own mind enough to think straight. He wished he had his pipe, but it had fallen out of his pockets during the collapse of the Ale-Maru, along with his gun. He could really use a puff now, damn it.
Positioned at the bow at the moment, holding the lantern and searching for obstacles, Sophia turned back to him, and he marveled at how composed she appeared, despite the coating of tainted water, despite the terror and horror of the last few hours. By the light of the lantern, she was pale and her face set, but there was no trembling, no stuttering, nothing to indicate what she surely felt inside—what he felt, anyway.
“Do you know what it was?” she asked.
He didn’t hesitate. “It was the cult of Magoth. It had to be. I recognized one of those guys on the docks—it was the preacher spreading the word of Magoth in Muscud.”
She considered. “When I left Muscud, the cult of Magoth was just rising, and since I’ve been away I’ve heard rumors of it growing like crazy. I knew there were many chapels to it, not just in Muscud but other undercities, too—but I never imagined its followers would build ... could build ... something like that.”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they found it. Restored it. They were working on it, remember. Installing the windows. Also, I think I saw some other construction.”
“Yes, maybe.”
“What worries me more than their remodeling project is the fact of that singing. That light. Could it really be … Magoth itself?” He blinked his eyes fast, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. “I thought it was just a bogeyman.”
She sort of smiled, and the gesture contained a hint of her old mischievousness. “You should know better than that. Down here there are no just bogeymen.”
He tried to laugh. It came out more of a whinny. “Well, we’d better get our story straight. Word is going to go around that Taluush burned and the G’zai rose up, and some will know we were there.”
She rolled a shoulder. “We’re refugees—like many others, surely. Well, I am. You were just visiting.”
“Why was I visiting?”
“Coming to see me, I guess.” She smiled ruefully. “Some will believe that.”
“We’ll have to keep a low profile. Remember, the Octunggen have a presence in Muscud: the factory. So does the Church of Magoth. We’re going into the lair of our enemies.”
“Are the people of Magoth really our enemies? I mean, the singing, it was so … lovely ...” She shook herself. “Maybe their religion is their own affair.”
“Look, I don’t know what they were worshipping—call it what you like, what the hell was that light coming from, anyway?—but it’s no coincidence it was close to the tunnel of the slugmines, where the boat was.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Remember, the Octunggen agent was delivering the briefcase to someone. He said they would meet him nearby. Who else could it be than worshippers of Magoth?”
“So ... the Magothians and the Octunggen, in league together on the eve of war. You know, Two-Bit, I think it might be time to consider a move.”
*
They came into wider, more traveled halls. Here the fog exuded by the sewer water was beginning to break up. The boats Tavlin spied kept their distance when they could and, when they came close, much playing of flashlights and lantern-lights was needed to put both sides at ease, a sort of code. The tunnels of the underworld were notorious for thievery and murder, but also stranger, more otherworldly dangers.