She lay down flat, pressing her ear to his strangely smooth skin. Parts of him were smooth at least. She guessed that overall, he was anything but smooth, but right where she lay, he was smooth. She waited for him to elaborate on his proclamation, pretty pleased with where he was going with it.
“Go on …”
“You will be hailed. They will exalt you. Stephanie, the Princess of the Infinite.”
She giggled, “Shut up.”
He went on, “I dreamed once, and in that dream I saw a single thread. You see the tapestry. You know the warp and weft of it. I saw one thread and thought myself a god. How strange it must feel to see so much more.”
She moved her cheek, stretching her hands out, wishing that he could see her dream.
“Guard your dream young princess. For now I will be your guard, but I grow weary of this form. Too long with thoughts that ebb and flow with the tides. My blood boils for one man’s downfall.”
Stephanie patted her hand gently. She shouted to Stanwick, “You coming up?”
Her voice responded from somewhere far below, “Dannum is not a horse Spiff.”
Tiernan ached for this. It had been more than a century since he had encountered real combat. There was so much energy. Most of the troops had chosen to forgo any concession to the fact that there would be cameras watching. The most fearsome of them twitched and jostled, their ferocious teeth on display, their eyes wild with hunger, their musculature barely constrained by the ballistic armor. Those were the Blood-Bastards who had stalked people’s nightmares for centuries gone, giving rise to wild tales and dreaded titles. Tiernan always reveled in the glory of a good title.
He watched the soldiers load onto the three li-jet heavy transports. With two armored transports on-board each aircraft, it would be cramped, but having the support of the .50 caliber machine guns would be a comfort. He stepped onto the tail ramp of the lead vehicle and walked down the narrow isle between the troops. There was no rallying cry. Toan had been exacting in the brief. No prisoners. No survivors.
The walls of the chamber began to tremor as Dannum moved, the huge ceiling canopy folding up on itself, the tunnel above barely visible to Stephanie’s eyes. The beast reared up and Stephanie tumbled backwards into Stanwick’s arms, but Stanwick was ready with her fingers dug deep into the flesh Dannum’s back, the leeches bonding her to him. Two house sized claws reached up, grappling with the coarse stone of the tunnel. Stephanie felt the rush of air warm air on her face as he lifted, dragging himself upwards.
“We’re going to wreck the house?” Stephanie shrieked, half excited, half petrified by the thought of the house collapsing on them.
“We’re not directly under the house. This passage curves back on itself.” Stanwick spoke close to Stephanie’s ear.
So much dust and debris fell on the two riders as Dannum’s giant claws scraped at the stone, carving long furrows as they went. Stephanie coughed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, “I can’t breathe.”
“Don’t then.” Stanwick yelled, “Let the delvers do their work. Just close your mouth.”
She tried. She closed her mouth and hummed, so desperate to burst into song now that she had the tune to little people in her head. Even knowing that she should be able to go without breathing, she couldn’t convince herself, so she wrapped the glardium tight around her face. She could see enough through the cloth, the tunnel above swaying wildly as she was jostled and jolted by the motion of Dannum’s muscles. The beast turned, clinging easily to the roof of the cave as it transitioned towards a flat passage. Stephanie slipped, her hands thrashing wildly for a finger hold as her body dangled. She managed to grasp hold of Stanwick’s neck, clinging tightly, pressing her cloth covered face against the back of Stanwick’s head.
Dannum corkscrewed about the tunnel until he was upright, barreling with great speed now. Stephanie swung wildly out to the side, her arms stronger than she had realized. She adjusted her grip, but her fingers somehow found their way to Stanwick’s mouth. She couldn’t let go, so she held on fast, one hand at Stanwick’s neck, the other with her fingers hooked over Stanwick’s bottom teeth. She could hear Stanwick’s laughter over her own scream, then finally her body smacked down onto the surface of Dannum’s back.
When the beast finally came to rest, Stephanie rested her head on Stanwick’s back and let out an exhausted whimper.
“I’m sorry.”
Stanwick released her grip and turned to face the child, “What are you sorry for?”
Stephanie laughed and wiped her fingers on the glardium, “I had my fingers in your mouth.”
“Oh that.” Stanwick raised her eyebrows, “You couldn’t help it. He’s fast.”
Stephanie nodded, “He’s scary. I’m glad he’s on our side.”
Stanwick pointed down the length of his body, “See his wings?”
Gasping, Stephanie leaned over and craned her neck.
“I don’t see them”
Stanwick shuffled closer to Stephanie, leaning their heads together and pointing at the long flap of leathery hide, “He can’t really fly with them, but when you see him with his wings spread wide, that’s scary.”
West had been a little surprised when he’d heard Stanwick use the word barracks. The thought of Stanwick stocking up with armaments and ammo was ludicrous. When he had opened the door to the next room, her words had started to make sense. The space read more like a more bizarre wing of a natural history museum. They were greeted by the sight of two long lines of skeletal animals, their bones pieced together in odd assemblages. He walked over to the nearest, stroking the tiger skull, his fingertips dipping over the curve of the frontal lobe, into the orbit. The skull sat atop the skeletal torso of a great ape, but the bones of the ape’s arms terminated in long hooked claws.
“Tasteful.” Charlene commented, a little appalled by what she saw.
“They’re not real.” West replied, “They’re casts.”
Walking towards a strange human-deer hybrid, David’s face screwed up in confusion “What’s the point?”
“Think of them as muses.” West suggested. He looked around, searching for the cooler cabinets he knew must be there somewhere. ‘Hithnatan eth durro’ he thought - muses and meat. In the great battlefields of the Mythologue, that was how barracks were stocked. He caught sight of them between the tree trunk bones of a mammoth; the side walls of the room lined with walk-in coolers.
Cobb stalked off further into the room, his eyes drawn to a large feline body which had been merged with a bull’s skull, “Stanwick makes these?”
West pulled open one of the cooler’s, “I don’t know. Probably. It’s a lost art.”
Cobb laughed, “Some things are meant to be lost.” He ran his hands over the bull’s horns, “So muses for what?”
Charlene remembered her first morning with the leeches. The fitness instructor, the bathroom mirror and all of the changes she had undergone. She stared at the tiger skull which West had touched. She had seen at least some small part of a battle of the Mythologue on the hopper. She moved closer, leaning in so that she could examine the teeth and the elongated jaw. Even the size of the skull didn’t seem like it would be too much of a challenge. No, she understood what West meant. The delvers understood. She pushed her jaw forward, feeling her lower canine teeth pressing into the flesh of her upper lip.
West returned to the center of the room, heaving a large carcass in his wake. He dropped it on the floor in between the two rows of skeletal abominations, “You know that fennec fox you were talking about?”
Cobb smiled broadly.
“Well,” West went on, “These muses are like your fennec fox.” He pointed towards the mammoth skeleton, “There’s nothing in this room that is beyond you.” He walked over to another muse, patting the thing on the spinal column, “The only thing that stands between you in your current form, and Cobb the bear headed antelope, is time and food.” He shoved the carcass with the toe of his shoe, “I don’t know how much ti
me we have, but the pantry is full.”
David’s nostrils flared as he looked at the meat, “I can’t eat that.”
West shrugged, “There’s other food in there. Shelves full of bratwurst, cooked chickens and cheeses.”
Charlene turned to face the others and opened her mouth, holding up her hands.
David froze rigid. Charlene’s face was wrong. He tried to articulate the thought, but he kept coming back to the same word. Just wrong. Her mouth was pushed forward, her teeth showing under lips spread too thin. She had spent little thought on her nose, which was still essentially a nose, but the cartilage of the bridge had extended with her mouth, so her nostrils were pushed wide. That mouth though. David couldn’t take his eyes off her teeth. He looked at the tiger skull and realized that her teeth were sharper, coming to dagger like points. All of them. Then he noticed her hands, or rather, he saw that her hands had become something much more frightening than her teeth. They weren’t remotely human, or even vaguely feline. Two large hook like claws extended several inches beyond where David imagined her fingers would have come to.
“Roar.” She tried to shout the word, but it was almost impossible to properly annunciate the rhotic consonant, so it just came out as a protracted ‘yaw’.
West clapped his hands together in elation,“There.” He patted Cobb’s back, “You see now? The muses.” He looked at Charlene’s body, which had understandably lost some of its mass. He walked over and hugged her, her claws digging awkwardly into his back, “Now you need to eat.”
Stephanie felt the change in Dannum, the heat rising, the muscles of his back flexing. He could hear them, somewhere up there. She felt his want. She saw it; the disembodied manifestation of his desire, moving out ahead of him with reckless abandon. But he waited, because through the child, he could see. Patience was its own reward. He beheld as each impulsive form bled on the unseen battlefield of an unwoven world. Patience. When the drone strikes started above them, cracks crazed the walls around them, the earth groaning worryingly. Patience.
“Does time really speed up when you get older?” Stephanie asked, because she knew that if anyone could answer, it would be Stanwick.
Stanwick stroked the debris out of Stephanie’s hair, “Time is whatever you make of it.”
Surprised by her answer, Stephanie glanced over her shoulder, “Aunt Hannah says the same thing.”
“She must be pretty smart then.”
Stephanie nodded, “Super smart.”
The tunnel shook again, rubble tumbling about Dannum’s claws far below.
“I wish Aunt Han was here.” Stephanie admitted, knuckling her eyes as she blinked away the dust. Before Stanwick could answer, Stephanie went on, “I know she couldn’t be here. I mean, I haven’t seen her. I don’t think she ever came along with us.”
Stanwick smiled, “It’s not really safe here.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes, “We’re fine.” She patted a scaly outcrop of Dannum’s back, then leaned on her side, resting her head. Listening to the rolling thunder of the drone strikes, Stephanie closed her eyes, “Are you married?”
“Well Stephanie, that is a complicated question.”
“Um, I don’t think so.” Stephanie corrected her, certain that she understood at least this much about the workings of the world.
Stanwick thought about the many vows she had made and broken. There was no easy way to explain it to a seven year old, so she settled for a half truth, “I’m not married any more, no.”
Stephanie sighed, satisfied that she was in the company of wisdom, “I don’t think I’ll ever get married.”
For twenty minutes their conversation meandered, punctuated by the thunderous noise of the drone strikes above. So many important questions. Favorite colors, books, films, princesses, food. Stanwick enjoyed answering. It was a rare opportunity to chisel herself in stone for that one moment in time, defined by a child’s perspective. When the bombing pattern seemed to reach a crescendo, Stephanie sat upright and handed the glardium weave to Stanwick, then held her arms over her head, “It’s time.”
Stanwick nodded, “So it is.” She wrapped the cloth about Stephanie, around her waist twice, allowing some of the material to drop in swags before collecting both ends of the train up and passing it up over her shoulders. She pulled the two ends of the cloth around Stephanie’s neck, then she pulled the rest of the material down Stephanie’s back, tucking it through the loop she had made about her waist.
Stephanie’s arms fell down to her sides. She thanked Stanwick, and hugged her, then the two of them crouched low, holding tight onto whatever handholds they could find in Dannum’s tough skin.
Dannum reared up, clawing at the rock overhead. There wasn’t far to climb. He bored a hole all about him, careful of his precious cargo. He would guard the child, and her dream. Up through soil, pushing forward now, towards the sounds of the engines and footsteps. Up through the ruins of the house, scooping aside tons of masonry with each claw.
Leveling off, he raised up on his rear haunches, waiting, because Dannum had seen. This was supposed to be Tiernan’s moment. This was the start of Tiernan’s great war against humanity, and out off the ashes, the birth of a true religion for the masses. Worship him and be spared. Tiernan had given them all a spectacle to behold; a resurrection for the modern age. Well, Dannum could hardly blame him for that. He had learned from the best. Born of Allim, raised on the book of Antrusca, Tiernan had grown up with that image of resurrection, but sure, hadn’t everyone? Even Dannum had grown up with a belief in the rebirth of the Lonorren, the architect of continents, and before Lonorren there was Yuntannan, and on and on. These people were no different. Resurrection was nothing new to them.
Time to give them something new.
Stephanie watched, detached from the reality which lay before her, because it was only a fragment of what there was to see. She felt Dannum’s consciousness, his bristling awareness of this new world. She felt the ground beneath him and the cool of the soil as his claws dug their colossal trenches. He heard something overhead, but Stephanie looked up to the sky and saw nothing. In that moment, there was such a surge of malevolent joy from Dannum. Malevolence wasn’t an emotion that Stephanie was familiar with. It rose in her, warm and absorbing, and in an attempt to expunge that new feeling from her range of emotion, she thought about Hannah, and she smiled.
Get up.
Dannum heard her command, but still he waited.
On Toan’s order, the battalion broke off into platoons of thirty, men and women marching in tight regimented groups. He was front and center and proud of it. He didn’t believe in leading from the rear. If he moved, his soldiers would follow. If he died, there were another forty men and women who had fought on the fields of the Mythologue and each of them were more than ready to step up. Dying didn’t seem likely. The estate was thoroughly demolished. They had hit the site so hard with the drone strikes that it had started to feel like an earthquake. Now, there was just rubble.
His platoon crossed a line of shrubs which bordered what was left of the driveway. His heart began to race, then a couple of seconds later he started to feel unsteady on his feet, his eye-line keeling off to one side, the horizon tilting. He reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the woman to his left, Lieutenant Kadalynn Royse. She held her right hand up towards her face, then pointed towards the ruins with her index finger.
Toan followed the line of her finger, and he saw. Just a glimpse. The solitary child standing in the wreck. Then either side of her, perhaps forty foot apart, the two heads lifted up from the ruins, one all scales and teeth, the other flashing a razor sharp beak, its large wide eyes facing forwards, piercing black set in rings of gold. He lost sight of the child, hidden by the hulking mass as the beast finally pushed up, out of the ground. There was the answer; the heart racing, the unease, the distant dread. There was the earthquake, the nightmare, the threat of oblivion. The beast unfurled its wings and the wind was so strong that the outermost plato
ons struggled to stay on their feet.
It was unthinkable. He wondered if Tiernan had known, but he supposed that even he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to bring so small a force to bear on a beast of the void. They had a platoon, Six .50 caliber machine gunners and the drones. He looked down the line towards Tiernan’s platoon, and saw that Tiernan was running across the lawn towards him. Clearly he hadn’t known. There was a gust of wind, the beast rearing up further, pushing out of the rubble with its hind legs, then it lunged forward, its front claws slamming into the earth not forty foot from the front line of the platoons.
The earth split, the driveway cracking and buckling. These were surefooted men and women, and many of them stumbled. Tiernan hurdled over a jagged ramp of concrete, sliding to home in front of Toan.
“We need to leave.” Toan yelled.
Tiernan shook his head, his eyes filled with fury, “There’s cameras on us. We need to take out its legs, feast on his carcass and pickle his fucking heads in brine.” He looked behind him, “How did she get her hands on a beast of the void?”
Toan unhooked his satellite phone from his hip, called in the orders to the rear gunners. He grabbed Tiernan’s arm before he had a chance to return to his platoon, “Did you see the girl?”
“Girl? You saw Stanwick?”
Toan shook his head, “Up there,” He pointed, “There’s a little girl, riding him.”
Tiernan laughed. “The tongues are wagging. Little shits messing with your head, remember?”
He didn’t watch Tiernan return to his troops. His eyes were back on the beast. He remembered. En masse, the delvers communicated more directly with the minds of their hosts. That girl though; he was sure she was real. He hadn’t even seen her until Lieutenant Royse had pointed her out.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 39