by David Drake
The ground gathered itself into a tentacle that spewed up from beneath the prisoner and hurled him skyward in its embrace. One hand and wrist, still tied to a deep stake, remained behind.
Two hundred feet above the heads of the others, the tentacle stopped and exploded as if it had struck a plate of lightning. Dame Alice had fallen backward when the ground surged, but though the book dropped from her hands she had been able to shout out the last words of what was necessary. The blast that struck the limb of earth shattered also the baobab. Sparrow, the only man able to stand on the bucking earth, was knocked off his feet by the shock wave. He hit and rolled, still gripping the two handguns he had leveled at the afterimage of the light-shot tentacle.
Afterwards they decided that the burned-meat odor must have been the priest, because no one else was injured or missing. Nothing but a track of sandy loam remained of the tentacle, spilled about the rope of green glass formed of it by the false lightning’s heat.
Colonel Trouville rose, coughing at the stench of ozone as sharp as that of the sulphur it had displaced. “De Vriny!” he called. “Get us one of these devil-bred swine who can guide us to the rebel settlement!”
“And who’ll you be finding to guide you, having seen this?” demanded the Irishwoman, kneeling now and brushing dirt from the fallen volume as if more than life depended on her care.
“Seen?” repeated Trouville. “And what have they seen?” The fury in his voice briefly stilled the nightbirds. “They will not guide us because one of them was crushed, pulled apart, burned? And have I not done as much myself a hundred times? If we need to feed twenty of them their own livers, faugh! the twenty-first will lead us—or the one after him will. This rebellion must end!”
“So it must,” whispered Dame Alice, rising like a champion who has won a skirmish but knows the real test is close at hand. She no longer appeared frail. “So it must, if there’s to be men on this earth in a month’s time.”
The ground shuddered a little.
* * *
Nothing moved in the forest but the shadows flung by the dancers around the fire. The flames spread them capering across the leaves and tree trunks, distorted and misshapen by the flickering.
They were no more misshapen than the dancers themselves as the light displayed them.
From a high, quivering scaffold of njogi cane, three men overlooked the dance. They were naked so that their varied mutilations were utterly apparent. De Vriny started at the sight of the one whose pale body gleamed red and orange in the firelight; but he was a faceless thing, unrecognizable. Besides, he was much thinner than the plump trader the Belgian had once known.
The clearing was a quarter-mile depression in the jungle. Huts, mere shanties of withe-framed leaves rather than the beehives of a normal village, huddled against one edge of it. If all had gone well, Trouville’s askaris were deployed beyond the hut with Osterman’s group closing the third segment of the ring. All should be ready to charge at the signal. There would not even be a fence to delay the spearmen.
Nor were there crops of any kind. The floor of the clearing was smooth and hard, trampled into that consistency by thousands of ritual patterns like the one now being woven around the fire. In, out, and around—crop-limbed men and women who hobbled if they had but one foot; who staggered, hunched and twisted from the whippings that had left bones glaring out of knots of scar tissue; who followed by touch the motions of the dancers ahead of them if their own eye-sockets were blank holes.
There was no music, but the voices of those who had tongues drummed in a ceaseless chant: “Ahtu! Ahtu!”
“The scum of the earth,” whispered de Vriny. “Low foreheads, thick jaws; skin the color of a monkey’s under its hair. Your Mr Darwin was right about Man’s descent from the apes, Dame Alice—if these brutes are, in fact, kin to Man.”
“Not my Mr Darwin,” the Irishwoman replied.
The Krooman steward, in loincloth now instead of tailcoat, was behind the three whites with a hissing bull’s-eye lantern. Dame Alice feared to raise its shutter yet, though, and instead ran her fingers nervously along the margins of her open book. Three other blacks, armed only with knives, stood by de Vriny as couriers in case the whistle signals were not enough. The rest of the Captain’s force was invisible, spread to either side of him along the margin of the trees.
“Don’t like this,” Sparrow said, shifting his revolvers a millimeter in their holsters to make sure they were free in the leather. “Too many niggers around. Some of’em are apt to be part of the mob down there, coming back late from a hunt or something. Any nigger comes running up in the dark and I’m gonna let’im hold one.”
“You’ll shoot no one without my order,” de Vriny snapped. “The Colonel may be sending orders, Osterman may need help—this business is going to be dangerous enough without some fool killing our own messengers. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you talking.” A stray glimmer of firelight caught the throbbing vein in Sparrow’s temple.
Rather than retort, the Belgian turned back to the clearing. After a moment he said, “I don’t see this god you’re looking for.”
Dame Alice’s mouth quirked. “You mean you don’t see a fetish,” she said. “You won’t. Ahtu isn’t a fetish.”
“Well, what kind of damned god is he then?” de Vriny asked in irritation.
The Irishwoman considered the question seriously, then said, “Maybe they aren’t gods at all, him and the others … it and the others Alhazred wrote of. Call them cancers, spewed down on Earth ages ago. Not life, surely, not even things—but able to shape, to misshape things into a semblance of life and to grow and to grow and to grow.”
“But grow into what, madame?” de Vriny pressed.
“Into what?” Dame Alice echoed sharply. Her eyes flashed with the sudden arrogance of her bandit ancestors, sure of themselves if of nothing else in the world. “Into this earth, this very planet, if unchecked. And we here will know tonight whether they can be checked yet again.”
“Then you seriously believe,” de Vriny began, sucking at his florid moustache to find a less offensive phrasing. “You believe that the Bakongos are worshipping a creature which would, will, begin to rule the world if you don’t stop it?”
Dame Alice looked at him. “Not ‘rule’, the world,” she corrected. “Rather become the world. This thing, this seed awakened in the jungle by the actions of men more depraved and foolish than I can easily believe … this existance, unchecked, would permeate our world like mold through a loaf of bread, until the very planet became a ball of viscid slime hurtling around the sun and stretching tentacles toward Mars. Yes, I believe that, Captain. Didn’t you see what was happening last night in the village?”
The Belgian only scowled in perplexity.
A silver note sang from across the broad clearing. De Vriny grunted, then put his long bosun’s pipe to his lips and sounded his reply even as Osterman’s signal joined it.
The dance broke apart as the once-solid earth began to dimple beneath men’s weight.
The Forest Guards burst out of the tree line with cries punctuated by the boom of Albini rifles. “Light!” ordered Dame Alice in a crackling alto, and the lantern threw its bright fan across the book she held. The scaffolding moved, seemed to sink straight into ground turned fluid as water. At the last instant the three figures on it linked hands and shouted, “Ahtu!” in triumph. Then they were gone.
In waves as complex as the sutures of a skull, motion began to extend through the soil of the clearing. A shrieking Baenga, spear raised to thrust into the nearest dancer, ran across one of the quivering lines. It rose across his body like the breaking surf and he shrieked again in a different tone. For a moment his black-headed spear bobbled on the surface. Then it, too, was engulfed with a faint plop that left behind only a slick of blood.
Dame Alice started chanting in a sing-song, molding a tongue meant for liquid Irish to a language not meant for tongues at all. A tremor in the earth drove toward her
and those about her. It had the hideous certainty of a torpedo track. Sparrow’s hands flexed. De Vriny stood stupefied, the whistle still at his lips and his pistol drawn but forgotten.
The three couriers looked at the oncoming movement, looked at each other … disappeared among the trees. Eyeballs white, the Krooman dropped his lantern and followed them. Quicker even than Sparrow, Dame Alice knelt and righted the lantern with her foot. She acted without missing a syllable of the formula stamped into her memory by long repetition.
Three meters away, a saw-blade of white fire ripped across the death advancing through the soil. The weaving trail blasted back toward the center of the clearing like an ant run blown by carbon disulphide.
De Vriny turned in amazement to the woman crouched so that the lantern glow would fall across the black-lettered pages of her book. “You did it!” he cried. “You stopped the thing!”
The middle of the clearing raised itself toward the night sky, raining down fragments of the bonfire that crowned it. Humans screamed—some at the touch of the fire, others as tendrils extruding from the towering center wrapped about them.
Dame Alice continued to chant.
The undergrowth whispered. “Behind you, Captain,” Sparrow said. His face had a thin smile. De Vriny turned, calling a challenge. The brush parted and a few feet in front of him were seven armed natives. The nearest walked on one foot and a stump. His left hand gripped the stock of a Winchester carbine; its barrel was supported by his right wrist since there was a knob of ancient scar tissue where the hand should have been attached.
De Vriny raised his Browning and slapped three shots into the native’s chest. Bloodspots sprang out against the dark skin like additional nipples. The black coughed and jerked the trigger of his own weapon. The carbine was so close to the Belgian’s chest that its muzzle flash ignited the linen of his shirt as it blew him backwards.
Sparrow giggled and shot the native through the bridge of his nose, snapping his head around as if a horse had kicked him in the face. The other blacks moved. Sparrow killed them all in a ripple of fire that would have done justice to a Gatling gun. The big revolvers slammed alternately, Sparrow using each orange muzzle flash to light a target for his other hand. He stopped shooting only when there was nothing left before his guns; nothing save a writhing tangle of bodies too freshly dead to be still. The air was thick with white smoke and the fecal stench of death. Behind the laughing gunman, Dame Alice Kilrea continued to chant.
Pulsing, rising, higher already than the giants of the forest ringing it, the fifty-foot thick column of what had been earth dominated the night. A spear of false lightning jabbed and glanced off, freezing the chaos below for the eyes of any watchers. From the base of the main neck had sprouted a ring of tendrils, ruddy and golden and glittering over all with inclusions of quartz. They snaked among the combatants as flexible as silk; when they closed, they ground together like millstones and spattered blood a dozen yards up the sides of the central column. The tendrils made no distinction between Forest Guards and the others who had danced for Ahtu.
Dame Alice stopped. The column surged and bent against the sky, its peak questing like the muzzle of a hunting dinosaur. Sparrow hissed, “For the love of God, bitch!” and raised a revolver he knew would be useless.
Dame Alice spoke five more words and flung her book down. The ground exploded in gouts of cauterizing flame.
It was not a hasty thing. Sparks roared and blazed as if the clearing were a cauldron into which gods poured furnaces of molten steel. The black column that was Ahtu twisted hugely, a cobra pinned to a bonfire. There was no heat, but the light itself seared the eyes and made bare flesh crawl.
With the suddenness of a torn puffball, Ahtu sucked inward. The earth sagged as though in losing its ability to move it had also lost all rigidity. At first the clearing had been slightly depressed. Now the center of it gaped like a drained boil, a twisted cylinder fed by the collapsing veins it had earlier shot through the earth.
When the blast came it was the more stunning for having followed a relative silence. There was a rending crash as something deep in the ground gave way; then a thousand tons of rock and soil blew skyward with volcanic power behind them. Where the earth had trembled with counterfeit life, filaments jerked along after the main mass. In some places they ripped the surface as much as a mile into the forest. After a time, dust and gravel began to sprinkle down on the trees, the lighter particles marking the canopy with a long flume down wind while larger rocks pattered through layer after layer of the hindering leaves. But it was only dirt, no different than the soil for hundreds of miles around into which trees thrust their roots and drew life from what was lifeless.
“God damn if you didn’t kill it,” Sparrow whispered, gazing in wonderment at the new crater. There was no longer any light but that of the hooked moon to silver the carnage and the surprising number of Forest Guards straggling back from the jungle to which they had fled. Some were beginning to joke as they picked among the bodies of their comrades and the dancers.
“I didn’t kill anything,” Dame Alice said. Her voice was hoarse, muffled besides by the fact that she was cradling her head on her knees. “Surgeons don’t kill cancers. They cut out what they can find, knowing that there’s always a little left to grow and spread again.…”
She raised her head. From across the clearing, Colonel Trouville was stepping toward them. He was as dapper and cool as always, skirting the gouge in the center, skirting also the group of Baengas with a two-year-old they must have found in one of the huts. One was holding the child by the ankles to drain all the blood through its slit throat while his companions gathered firewood.
“But without the ones who worshipped it,” Dame Alice went on, “without the ones who drew the kernel up to a growth that would have been … the end of Man, the end of Life here in any sense you or I—or those out there—would have recognized it.… It’ll be more than our lifetimes before Ahtu returns. I wonder why those ones gave themselves so wholly to an evil that would have destroyed them first?”
Sparrow giggled again. Dame Alice turned from the approaching Belgian to see if the source of the humor showed on the gunman’s face.
“It’s like this,” Sparrow said. “If they was evil, I guess that makes us good. I’d never thought of that before, is all.”
He continued to giggle. The laughter of the Baengas echoed him from the clearing as they thrust the child down on a rough spit. Their teeth had been filed to points which the moonlight turned to jewels.
FIREFIGHT
“Christ,” Ginelli said, staring at the dusty wilderness, “if this is a sample, the next move’ll be to Hell. And a firebase there’d be cooler.”
Herrold lit a cigarette and poked the pack toward his subordinate. “Have one,” he suggested.
“Not unless it’s grass,” the heavy newbie muttered. He flapped the sleeveless flak jacket away from his flesh, feeling streaks of momentary chill as sweat started from beneath the quilted nylon. “Christ, How d’you stand it?”
Herrold, rangy and big-jointed, leaned back in the dome seat and cocked one leg over the flamethrower’s muzzle. Ginelli envied the track commander’s build every time he looked at the taller man. His own basic training only four months before had been a ghastly round of extra physical training to sweat off pounds of his mother’s pasta.
“Better get used to it,” Herrold warned lazily. “This zippo always winds up at the back of the column, so we always wait to set up in the new laagers. Think about them—pretend you’re a tree.”
Ginelli followed his TC’s finger toward the eight giant trees in the stone enclosure. It didn’t help. Their tops reached a hundred feet into the air above the desolate plain, standing aloof from the activity that raised a pall of dust beside them. The shadows pooling beneath could not cool Ginelli as he squatted sun-dazzled on the deck of the flame track.
At least Colonel Boyle was just as hot where he stood directing placements from the sandbagged de
ck of his vehicle. Hieu stood beside him as usual. You could always recognize the interpreter at a distance because of the tiger fatigues he wore, darkly streaked with black and green. Below the two, radiomen were stringing the last of the tarpaulin passageways that joined the three command vehicles into a Tactical Operations Center. Now you could move between the blacked-out tracks in the dark; but the cool of the night seemed far away.
On the roof, Boyle pointed and said something to Hieu. The dark-skinned interpreter’s nod was emphatic; the colonel spoke into his neck-slung microphone and the two vehicles ahead of the flame track grunted into motion. Herrold straightened suddenly as his radio helmet burped at him. “Seven-zero, roger,” he replied.
“We movin’?” Ginelli asked, leaning closer to the TC to hear him better. Herrold flipped the switch by his left ear forward to intercom and said, “OK, Murray, they want us on the west side against that stone wall. There’ll be a ground guide, so take it easy.”
Murray edged the zippo forward, driving it clockwise around the circuit other tracks had clawed in the barren earth. Except for the grove within the roomy laterite enclosure, there was nothing growing closer than the rubber plantation whose rigid files marched green and silver a mile to the east. Low dikes, mostly fallen into the crumbling soil, ordered the wasteland. Dust plumed in the far distance as a motorbike pulled out of the rubber and turned toward the firebase. Coke girls already, Ginelli thought. Even in this desert.
Whatever the region’s problem was it couldn’t have been with the soil itself; not if trees like the monsters behind the low wall could grow in it. Every one of the eight the massive stonework girdled was forty feet around at the base. The wrinkled bole of the central titan could have been half that again.