“But that’s not how it has always been,” Nissi whispered, staring down at her hands. “I actually know of a time when there wasn’t a Deepseeker.”
This time, Thukkar and I stared at her in astonishment. “What do you mean?” I asked. The Stormcallers were known to keep many secrets, and the way Nissi wasn’t looking at either of us, made me wonder if I wanted to know the answer.
Nissikul met my eyes. “I snuck into Lot’s hut a couple times when he was out training the new ‘Callers.” She grimaced. “Don’t look at me like that, I was curious. Anyway, I have read some of his scrolls, and there’s one written by the Elder before the one that trained him.” She paused for a moment, letting that sink in. The Stormcallers could live for a very long time, and if the writer of the scroll Nissikul had read had been the predecessor to Lot’s own predecessor, then this scroll was older even than our grandparents. No one in the tribe would remember anything about this- everyone who had been alive when that had been written was dead. Our people’s history was maintained by the Stormcallers. If they didn’t record it, it didn’t happen, at least in the long run. Most of us didn’t actually know how to read or write. Vellum wasn’t very common, and teaching every one of the Erin-Vulur to read and write would have been a waste of resources. Most of the rangers could read, but our ability to write was limited to whatever untidy scrawl was needed to produce our trail sign. I looked over at Thukkar and was pleased to see that he also seemed to have come to the same understanding of the situation that I had.
Seeing that we were both caught up with her, Nissikul continued. “The writings of Elder Averama said that there was some kind of horrible accident in the deep places beneath the mountain, back when the Erin-Caval still lived down in the depths beneath us- before the Eater-King came down. They had always been the ones to find the blessings that kept the rangers warm, back in those days, and they were usually rooting around in the dark down there. I think they considered it their people’s holy quest to find the Great Urn, the vessel that Palamun used to carry all the Erinye here to Ravanur. Anyway, they found something they should have left alone, and many of their people died in a mysterious plague. We sent rangers to investigate, and to help them seal away whatever they had found. In the process, one of those rangers went missing, and Averama thought he was dead.”
Thukkar and I looked at each other, frowning. The wounded man spoke first. “If this involved so many rangers, why don’t we know about this?” He looked over at me for support. “Our people don’t keep scrolls like yours, but our history is kept in song and story, told around our great hearth all the time. There are no stories about the world-shaking, and no stories about a plague among the Erin-Caval.”
Nissikul turned her palm up in a gesture of “who knows”, and took another bite of her food. She chewed and swallowed, and continued. “Averama doesn’t speak much about the ranger’s, except to note that one of them disappeared. She says that after Erin-Caval were safe again, the missing ranger reappeared, bearing bundles of strange metal things, dragging them up out of the ice. He had no memory of what had happened to him during the efforts to help the Erin-Caval, only that he had woken in a place deeper than he had ever been before, wounded, and surrounded by ancient metal magicks. He was able to make use of some of them to keep himself alive, and when he realized that he could use them to help our people, he brought as many of them back as he could carry.”
“The Deepseeker,” I said, understanding. “That lost ranger is now the Deepseeker we all know.”
Thukkar hadn’t stopped frowning. “But if that’s how it happened, why didn’t Averama accuse him of being corrupted then?”
Nissikul laughed, not entirely kindly. “You said it yourself. We Stormcallers are strange, and you all fear us. The Deepseeker brought back things to protect our people, better magicks than even the Erin-Caval could procure. In Averama’s time, no one but Stormcallers could stay alive on the surface for more than a day. When the Deepseeker appeared, he made it possible for you warriors to range much further, seek much better prey. The Erin-Vulur were able to take down many more burug since our rangers could follow the great beasts for much longer, rather than just waiting for them to come close to our village. We all ate better, and people were happier. Many more babies were born. Our tribe grew stronger, stronger than any of the other tribes. And Averama knew that without hard proof that the Deepseeker was corrupted, she could never accuse him, not without risking our own tribe turning against her and the rest of the Stormcallers.” Nissikul shrugged. “She never found that proof and neither did her successor. Neither did my master as far as I knew, though he tried very hard to find something he could use.”
We all sat there in silence for a while, contemplating what this all could mean. Finally, Thukkar spoke. “So we can’t really trust the Deepseeker because we don’t know where his power came from. And we can’t really trust the Elder of the Stormcallers, because he has lied and used us, and don’t really know what he wants.”
Nissikul sighed, using the corner of my cloak to wipe her mouth and hands clean. “So what can we do?”
I stood, looked out over the chasm, and said, “We find Joanna. If Palamun sent her, she might have some idea what we should do.” I sounded more confident than I felt. If the Deepseeker was corrupted, if he had always been corrupted, then what did that mean for my people? We had been using his blessings for three generations. And what did that mean for someone with one of his metal blessings beating in his chest instead of a heart? What did that mean for me?
…
Chapter Eleven: We Are Beneath
Joanna
I woke feeling more exhausted than I had when I had gone to sleep. I supposed that I hadn’t so much gone to a dream world as much as I had spent the night in a lucid nightmare. My body might have slept and recharged, but my mind was weary. I was tired of Chalice, tired of the ice and the cold, tired of my armor- but more than anything else I was tired of being afraid. I tried to cling to the cold, unflagging certainty of the tigress. I tried to remember the way I had been when I had lived on my own in the ruins, before I had been called Joanna Angeles. But the truth was, even then, I had been afraid. The tigress wasn’t fearless; she just knew how to handle fear through action, through cold calm. But this fear was worse than anything else I had ever experienced. It wasn’t the fear of going hungry or the fear of being shot. It wasn’t the sharp, immediate fear of seeing a hungry predator animal staring at me, or the sudden sinking, rational terror of hearing the old Geiger counter I had carried in those days start up its clicking litany. No, this fear was deeper, crueler, inescapable, and inexorable. The fear I felt now was more like the kind described in stories told by the survivors in the bad old days when the war still raged on- the kind of gut-shriveling existential dread that came from not knowing what was out there. I knew that there was something out here, something bigger, stronger, and probably smarter than me. I didn’t know what it wanted, didn’t know why it had chosen to reveal itself to me. I just knew that it was there, it was Beneath me, and it could even reach up and touch me in my dreams. I needed off of this frozen hell-moon, but there was no way out.
I got up, checked my gear, and secured the data archives in a storage pouch by the weird burug heart that I was carrying. I didn’t know where I planned to go, but I needed to move. I couldn’t really go up- the Erin-Vulur were up there, and if our last interaction was any indication, they would probably try to kill me again, the moment I saw them. Sure, I could smack down Neolithic tribesmen by the handful, all day, every day until I ran out of nutrients in my suit. But the Stormcallers were something entirely different, and I was starting to suspect that there might be something more to this moon- and its inhabitants- than there seemed at first glance.
I could feel Barbas in my mind, an insubstantial itch just over my shoulder, like someone was leaning over and examining something I was working on. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t prompt him to. Our world had just become a little less safe, a
little less sensible. Our personal private sanctum had been denied to us, and the substitute we had made, had been invaded, violated, and was no longer the same. My waking life was a struggle to survive a hateful, inhospitable environment, and now my dreaming world was a battlefield. We couldn’t leave. We couldn’t continue our work here. There was only one thing we really could do. We Are Beneath. “We need to go down,” Barbas declared, grimly. I only nodded, trusting that he knew what I was thinking. Whatever was down there, in the dark, beneath the glacier, it clearly wanted something with me- with both of us- and at this point, doing anything but descending further was just delaying the inevitable.
I brought up the control display for the fabricator. It came to life with a high, whirring whine, and a shimmering cloud of nanites emerged from it in a stream, circling into a halo around me. Barbas knew what I wanted to do. No more searching through cracks in the ice, no more following winding paths. I wasn’t trying to preserve some delicate machine, and chances were, where we were going, we wouldn’t be coming out. Barbas programmed his instructions into the fabricator with his usual consummate precision, and the halo of nanites dipped, spiraling down to bite a circle into the ice beneath my feet. I drew my pistol, for all the good it would actually do me, and closed my eyes. The ice began to dissolve beneath me, ground into fine glacial sand by the microscopic teeth and cutters of the tiny machines, and slowly I began to descend. I was going to meet my fate one way or another.
…
Volistad
Nissikul woke up with a shout, and I quickly followed, reacting to her cry of surprise. I leaped to my feet, snatching up my greathammer with one hand and staring all around our campsite for a target. Was someone here? Had the Dark Ones sent some kind of agent to attack us? I spun and scanned the whole area, taking a step towards the abyss beside our camp and peering down into it, just to be safe. Nothing. There was no immediate danger. I turned to Nissikul and found her staring away into nothing, her black eyes wide. “Nissi? What is it?”
“Your god, Vol. I know where she is.” She turned her head sharply, watching something I couldn’t see, her gaze tracking slowly downward.
“What?”
“I know where she is! Joanna! I can see her!”
By this time, Thukkar was awake, and he clambered unsteadily to his feet, using the nearby ice wall as support. “What’s going on?”
I was already moving, packing my sleeping furs and supplies back into my pack and making sure that the dukkar seal corpse I had field stripped was ready for travel. “Pack your things,” I snapped. “We need to move.” I looked up at Nissikul. “Where is she?”
“Far below,” she groaned. “Going lower, and moving very fast.”
“The Dark Ones,” I growled. “They must have a hold of her. Can we catch her?”
Nissikul shook her head. “No. She must be making some kind of direct path down, like a Stormcaller’s war tunnel.”
“Can you do the same?” Thukkar cut in. “Can’t you just guess which way she’s going and open a passage directly towards her?”
Nissikul closed her eyes and concentrated, saying nothing for a while. “Not possible,” she finally answered, straightening. “Ravanur’s skin is too thick. I could not move that much ice, not without help from at least eight of my brothers or sisters. I don’t know how she’s doing it.”
I looked over the edge of the chasm again. “What about this? Can you tell how far down it goes?”
Once again, my sister closed her eyes and focused. This time, I could see little arcs and bands of light refracting around her fingers, as if she had just dropped a handful of crushed ice over a glowstone. It was strange; I had never seen that before. This time, we had to wait quite a while for her to speak again. When she spoke, her voice was strained. “It goes all the way down.”
“Where?” I asked, frowning. “All the way down to where?”
“All the way down to the stone. This chasm goes down hundreds of spearcasts, and I’m certain that it goes all the way down to the stone flesh of the Great Mother Herself.” She looked back up at me, and I saw naked fear there, reflected in her vast, blank eyes. “Vol- I don’t know if I can go down that far. To walk on the naked skin of Ravanur- that seems like blasphemy.” She clenched her remaining fist and walked over to the edge of the seemingly endless pit, then leaned out over it and looked down into the depths.
I took a long look at Nissi, her missing arm, her battered, bruised body, the hollow, haunted look around her eyes, and in the same look, I took in Thukkar’s battered frame and unsteady stance. They were in bad shape. If there was going to be a fight- and I could feel one coming- they were in no shape to do much besides dying needlessly. “I’ll do it. You just take me as far down as you can go, and then you and Thukkar can make a camp and wait for me. I’ll go get Joanna myself. If someone’s going to offend Palamun, it might as well be me. I’m already dead, after all.”
“Vol-” Nissi began, but I cut her off with a sharp wave of my hand.
“No Nissi, we don’t have much time. We need her. The Erin-Vulur need her, and if we don’t get to her, Palamun only knows what the Dark Ones have planned.” I shouldered my pack and began to check over my weapons. “Come on, we need to go, now.”
Nissikul grimaced, then knelt and touched the ragged stump of her right shoulder to the ice. She spoke a few hard, percussive syllables, and once again I saw the shimmering cloud gather, this time all around the stump of her arm. She straightened up, quickly, like someone drawing back swiftly from a poisonous stinging insect, and when she did, there was a new arm, the twin to her left, attached to her shoulder. It was black as pitch and cold as the darkest heart, and as I watched, black tendrils like veins grew from the black shoulder and branched out into the flesh beneath. She quickly resettled my cloak about her bare shoulders and rewrapped it about her more securely. “Alright. Vol, Thukkar, stand… there.” She pointed at a section of the frozen cliff beside the abyss and gestured for us to move over to it. “And sit down. If you fall off, I will have no way to protect you. You will certainly die.”
“Well,” Thukkar grumbled, hobbling over with the aid of one of my iron short-spears as a cane. “That’s encouraging.” He took his place on the indicated section of the cliff, and I helped him sit, following suit and sitting down myself a moment later.
Nissikul stepped forward, close to us, and raised both of her hands, turning them so that her palms were facing down. She took a deep, cleansing breath, and muttered something almost inaudible.
“What?” I asked.
She grinned. “I hope you’re not afraid of falling.” The ice all around us split, at once, with a collected, echoing crack like the snap of an enormous leather whip. Three perfectly straight, perfectly smooth cuts appeared in the frozen surface, and our chunk of glacial ice began to slide down into the darkness, unrestrained. At the last moment, when I was sure we would pitch forward or backward and be sent tumbling into the abyss, segmented, insectoid legs shaped from Stormcaller witch-ice rose up beneath our falling perch, and they scrabbled at the wall, slowing our pace almost immediately. I watched, fascinated, as the hideous legs scrabbled down the abyss walls, lengthening and shrinking as the tunnels expanded and contracted, all beneath the iron will of Nissikul.
“Hold on Joanna,” I muttered, my hammer gripped tightly in my fists. “We’re coming.”
…
Joanna
The nanite-tunnel spit me out of the bottom of the glacier in a great plume of powdered ice, and to my surprise I found myself falling, dropping through nearly fifteen meters of empty blackness before I hit the ground. Barbas, however, had been prepared for this, and before I could crash at incredible speed into the stone, the AI fired a series of jets built into my armor’s legs just for this purpose. Really, I should have thought of it myself, but it was hard to think tactically when it was my body dropping like a stone into unknown depths. I slowed dramatically, and instead of plowing into the ground at something near terminal v
elocity, I just landed very hard, cracking some of the ancient, craggy stone beneath my feet and sending up a flurry of dust, shaved ice, and shards of rock. I didn’t stay still. I turned, quickly, snapping on my headlamp and raising my gun to aim into the darkness.
Barbas accessed my suit’s sensor package, and there was a loud PING as a pulse burst from me and surged out into the darkness. Deftly, the djinni translated the data into a visual overlay on my Heads Up Display, and for a moment, I could see a massive, cavernous space, outlined in a faint, bluish holographic glow. We were completely beneath the glacier- miles below the surface- and we weren’t alone. “Bodies,” I whispered, the mounting terror threatening to rise up and choke me. “Those are piles of bodies.”
Barbas fired another blast of sonar, a stronger one this time, and as the wave of sound passed through the great cavern, I could see them more clearly now. Hundreds- no thousands of corpses, most of them humanoid, piled into frozen mounds all around us. I stepped closer to one of the piles of the dead and shone my light on them. They were humanoid, like the Erin-Vulur, though some of them had a coating of light fur now limned with frost. They lay sprawled and tumbled in death, though none of them showed many signs of injury. I couldn’t tell how they died, except to guess that they had been frozen to death. There were men, women, children, the elderly, all of them dressed in a wide variety of clothes, furs, and armors- and each one of them simply stared out into the darkness with the same empty, wide-eyed expression. This cavern was a vast, multi-species mass grave, and I could not have done more than guess at what killed them all.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 19