by Jack Conner
Soon the man was no more than bone, then not even that.
As a few last swirls of flesh and blood still coursed through it, the R’loth slouched back away from the altar, leaving a trail of steaming slime, and two priests replaced it. They intoned something with their heads bowed, and the congregation repeated it. Avery realized they spoke some form of ancient L’ohen. He was about to ask Layanna about it when Sygrel gestured them forward, and they eased around the periphery of the great room. At the front, the R’loth raised its many limbs, which pulsed with lights, to the congregation, and they chanted something loudly, their faces reflecting the unnatural illumination. The R’loth ducked through a rear entrance and was gone.
Sygrel ushered Avery and the rest through a similar door on the side of the room, then through a network of tunnels, each one different, some composed of sheets of aluminum, some mud-brick, stone, or rotting wood. Some of it even looked petrified. To Avery it seemed as if he was passing through the innards of an ant mound. Weird cells lined the main halls. Some had been covered with doors, a few even lit by electric bulbs. Men and women in ragged clothes slept in them, or cleaned their guns, or prayed. Obviously whoever had built this place had hijacked electricity from the main subway power grid.
“So,” Hildra said, “what was that back there? I thought we were going to meet up with the good guys. Instead ...” She made a disgusted noise. “It’s just the Mnuthra all over again.”
“Hold your tongue,” growled Sygrel.
“My friends do what they must,” Layanna told Hildra. “They’re dying, remember. They need the flesh of an intelligent being with the sea in their blood. Did you see his uniform? He was a Collossumist. A follower of the Collossum.”
“Well, he was still human,” Hildra said, then added, “more or less.”
“He was an enemy soldier. Would you not have shot him if you could? At least this way his death mattered—prolonging the life of someone who fights against the Collossum.”
The tunnels led to a high hall. There the R’loth that had just fed, emerging from its amoeba-form, which dwindled and vanished with that same eerie sucking noise Layanna’s made, waited for them; he must have heard their footsteps. When they entered the hall, a strange, hopeful look lit his eyes.
When he saw Layanna, and she saw him, emotion contorted both of their faces, and they embraced tightly, as of a brother and sister long separated.
“It’s so wonderful to see you,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, too.” But when they parted, she stared at him in horror.
Like all of the other Collossum, this R’loth seemed human, and was on this plane, more or less, but something had happened to him, and he had been greatly altered. One side of his face appeared to be made of glass, and much of his body, from what Avery could see of it—he had been nude during the ceremony and was only now donning a robe, handed to him by a priest, both quite un-self-consciously—was also seemingly fashioned of glass, at least in patches. The glass, like that of the calf of his right leg, bent and flexed the same as living flesh. The many patches of this glass-like substance covered his body from scalp to toe, and Avery was reminded of various illnesses he had seen and studied, of rashes and the like, but instead of reddened and diseased flesh—glass. The patches seemed to be spreading, or that was the impression Avery received.
The man, if he could be called that, nodded gravely at Layanna. “You see what our brothers in the Temple did to us.”
Layanna’s eyes grew moist. “I am so sorry, Yaslen. So, so sorry.”
He shrugged. “We knew what the price for rebellion might be. Just brace yourself. All the others are as bad as I am, if not worse. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. The Collossum designed it to avoid blowback.” He took another long look at her, and squeezed her shoulder. “It is so good to see you. I knew to expect you, but still ... I’m overcome.” His gaze wandered to Avery, Janx and Hildra. “And who are these?”
“My friends,” Layanna said.
Hildra opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated. Even she used caution before an unknown R’loth.
“They’ve saved my life many times,” Layanna went on. “It’s no exaggeration to say that without them I wouldn’t have made it back to you or even been able to send the plans in the first place.”
“Then I’m grateful to you,” Yaslen said, looking into the eyes of Avery, Janx and Hildra in turn. He was a good-looking man, Avery realized, or had been, with blond hair and a well-defined jaw. His green eyes showed intelligence and confidence, perhaps even kindness, which was discomfiting after having just watched him accept a human sacrifice. “I hope to know all your names and thank you all personally, but first let me take your ... ah, charge—” here he smiled “—to meet the rest of her colleagues. It has been a reunion long delayed.”
Avery opened his mouth to agree. He could use the rest, and his enthusiasm for meeting the gods had faded after witnessing the sacrifice. But Layanna spoke first:
“They’re with me. They go where I go.”
Avery cleared his throat softly. “Actually, I’m sure Janx could use some rest ...”
Janx snorted, even though one hand pressed against his side as if holding his guts in. “Quit now, after all this?” To Layanna, he said, “We goin’ where I think we are?”
She almost smiled. “I believe so.”
“Then let’s be at it.”
Avery sighed.
“Take us to it, Yaslen,” she said with sudden intensity. “Take us to the Device.”
* * *
It quickly became clear that the rear passages were the province of priests and gods alone, as Sygrel, with a last bow to Layanna and Yaslen, turned and led his crew away, while the few priests that accompanied Yaslen remained. They wore dark maroon robes with gold emblems on their chests (It was a representation of Vilgest, Avery learned, the great trident-staff gifted to King Gytherung by the High Elder of the Collossum long, long ago. It was the central image in their religion, symbolizing the hope, knowledge and salvation the Collossum had brought to Octung. The Lightning Crown, by contrast, symbolized the blessing of more human authorities).
“This is a large sanctuary,” Layanna noted as they passed through a warren of tunnels with more small cells lining the way. In them, robed men and women stirred or slept.
“Yes, we were quite fortunate to find this location,” Yaslen said. “Too often we’ve been crammed in some rat-hole. It’s become especially difficult lately, because our followers have become known to the Collossum. They’ve had to bring their families with them into hiding rather than have them be taken. Now we have scores of entire family units on the march with us. Usually we have to find separate locations, but here we were able to bring the whole flock together for the first time in months. It’s been a great relief.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Janx, and Yaslen appeared surprised to hear correction from a mere mortal. “If all your people are here, it only takes one attack to finish you.”
“We’re not fools,” Yaslen said. “That thought had occurred to us, as well. We’ve built a bomb that will destroy the Device should our enemies attack; if nothing else we can prevent them from getting their hands on it. But hopefully it won’t come to that. We regularly drill our followers in how to repel attacks, and we are even now finishing the details of our escape route. There is another level of the subway system below this, rudimentary and never completed, but there are tracks, and they go on for quite a ways.”
“And your people?” said Hildra. “They can’t all go by subway.”
“No, there are tunnels, hidden places ...” Yaslen waved it away. “It will be costly, I admit, if we’re attacked here. But with strength of numbers we can resist our enemies long enough for ... Well.”
“You were about to say long enough for us to escape, weren’t you?” Hildra said.
“I know it may seem cold-blooded to you, but the truth is that our followers, while a great help in the beginning, a
re now a yoke around our necks, encumbering our movements and limiting our capabilities. We’re grateful to them for their service, for helping us strike the priests and resources of our enemies, for bringing us sustenance, but lately ... lately we fear that they will be our downfall. There are simply too many. They make our group unwieldy and vulnerable to discovery. And if we fall, what hope is there for the world?” He paused. “At our last sanctuary we discovered a secret shrine to the Collossum.”
“No,” said Layanna, shocked.
“We blame it on the family members of our worshippers, those they were forced to take into hiding with them,” he said. “These extended flock, many of them, they still worship our friends in the Temple, and this group that I mention had secretly formed an organization amongst themselves and had even erected a small chapel to pay homage to the Collossum. They would ritually cut themselves and let blood fall on an altar. Fortunately they didn’t know how to awaken it to make it a true conduit; otherwise our brothers and sisters would have been led right to us.”
“That’s horrible,” Layanna said.
“What did you do to them?” Hildra asked.
Yaslen was grim. “We had to make an example of them. We had no choice.”
“What exactly did you do them?”
“We had them volunteer themselves for the altar. Our altar.”
“You ate them! Fuck!”
“It was necessary. We didn’t like it either—it made our true followers uncomfortable; sacrifices should be gifts of oneself, or captives of war—but it was the only way. Perhaps next time they would have awoken the altar. And mere executions would have been wastes of food.” He shook his head. “As you’ve pointed out, an attack by our brothers and sisters in the Temple would be costly, perhaps even conclusive. Our greatest strength is secrecy. No one knows we’re here. And that can’t be allowed to change.”
They reached a staircase and started down. Here the tunnels had been hewn out of stone, and they dripped with moisture. The air was steamy and rank. They came into wide, open halls with larger rooms. Avery was only mildly surprised to see fuse boxes and wires snaking across the walls. Yaslen said, as if to confirm Avery’s suspicions, “Squatters installed electricity long ago, pirated from the subway system, and we’ve improved on it.”
“The Device,” Layanna said, impatient for news. “How does it go?”
“You’ll see in just a moment. We’re almost there. Yes … here we are.”
They passed into a large open room, bowed in the center, possibly a former drug lab, judging by the exotic chemical reek that seemed baked into the cement and metal walls, and it was here that Avery finally saw the thing that he had come across a warzone to behold. The object that was clearly the Device stood in the center of the chamber surrounded by machines and three Black Sect members, who in turn were waited on by half a dozen priests. More Black Secters loitered about the room, some lying on cots or even the floor, hooked up to IV drips, others sleeping or eating. They all looked consumed by the same disease Yaslen suffered from, the glass-rot, some so severely that they didn’t seem able to stand. The room was clearly a laboratory of sorts, and bulky machines, hissing and spitting sparks, lit the walls and domed ceiling with flashes of light and fire. The machines thrummed so violently that Avery could feel the floor shake beneath his feet, and they lent a smoky, greasy taint to the air.
The Device resembled a long, cylindrical engine, maybe ten feet long and four in diameter. The Black Sect members working on it were less diseased than many of the others, though Avery imagined they worked in shifts and that even the less well among them would be pressed to work at some point. Tentacles and phantasmagorical limbs seeped out from the three R’loth and plunged into the Device, likely working on some other plane inside, while their human hands, jutting from their sacs, which were drawn closely about them, threaded wires, fitted machinery and performed numerous operations on this plane.
The Black Sect members glanced up at the arrival of Yaslen and Layanna, and immediately their attention shifted. Those that could rushed over and embraced her, and Avery was heartened at this display of seeming humanity. Others, weaker or occupied, called out her name or said their hellos from afar. She smiled and acknowledged them all in turn, lingering during several embraces. She was clearly moved to see them again. Tears glistened in her eyes, and they openly poured down the cheeks of others. But time and time again her gaze strayed to the Device.
At last, when all the helloes had been said, she pleaded for her colleagues to go back to what they’d been doing and turned to Yaslen. An expression of dread and dismay had come over her, and Avery began to feel a knot form in his belly.
“It’s ... it’s ...” she started.
Yaslen sighed and hung his head. “It’s actually farther along than it looks, Layanna. But ...”
“What?” She gripped his arm and squeezed it. “What?”
He mashed his eyes shut. “The Collossum ... they’ve been attacking us with greater and greater frequency. Again I blame our new recruits. But the worst attack was after you communed with us from Cuithril and gave us the plans for the Device. They, the Collossum, hit us hard and fast. Poisoned, we only just barely managed to make it out in time, and we had to leave many of our materials behind. Since then, our people have been able to secure replacements, but it has been a scramble, and the Collossum keep stymieing us, or trying to.”
“But I see ... you have what looks like all the materials now ...”
“Yes. We’ve assembled them—painstakingly—one by one, even going so far as to raid the smaller temples. But it’s taken too long.”
“You mean ... ?”
“Yes. We’ve become too weak to finish the Device. It’s even worse than we feared when you communed with us from Cuithril. We’re almost gone, Layanna. Not even constant infusions of extradimensional flesh and medicines have been able to preserve us. Only a few can work at a time, while the rest recuperate. At this rate, it will take months to finish, and we don’t have months.”
Layanna stuck out her chin. “I will finish. Leave it to me. I designed it. It’s only right that I finish it.”
Yaslen let out a breath. “Yes. Yes, of course. But ...”
“What is it, Yaslen? What aren’t you telling me?”
Yaslen drew his brows together. “It came into our knowledge only recently ... Our spies aren’t what they were ...”
“Tell me.”
He looked as if the next words cost him. “The Collossum—they’re assembling all their members, from all the temples in Octung. All are converging on the Great Temple.”
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Layanna looked startled. “For what possible purpose?”
“We don’t know. But if you are truly going to finish the Device, you need to deal with it.”
She mashed her eyes shut. “This is terrible news. What could they be up to?”
“Something to do with that, obviously,” Avery spoke up, indicating the Device. “It must be. What else could be so important to them?”
“Yes,” Yaslen agreed. “The Device is the only thing they fear. And now, while we grow weaker, they gather to deliver a fatal blow before we can fire it.”
“They’re planning some way to get at you,” said Janx. “Us.”
Yaslen looked thoughtful. “We don’t believe they know our location, otherwise they would have struck already. It must be something else, not a direct attack, but related to stopping the completion of the Device all the same. Yet, if we don’t know what, how can we defend against it?” He shook his head and collapsed against a bulky machine. “It’s useless, Layanna. We will continue working on the Device, yes, or you will, but unless we can meet this threat, our pitiful attempt at revolt will be crushed before the Device can be activated.”
“To me, if you’ll forgive the intrusion,” Avery said, “it sounds like you’ve let the Collossum demoralize you. Why? We have the Device right here. It’s almost built! Soon we’ll ac
tivate it and Octung’s war will grind to a halt. The Octunggen will be thrown back, their government will collapse and the Collossum killed or driven out.”
“The Doc’s right,” Janx said. “Show some spine.”
Yaslen glared at them, but the strength had gone out of him and the glare was mild. “The vultures gather, humans. Our stink must be in the air. So what if the war grinds to a halt if it’s already won? And it is a long way from building the Device to activating it.”
Avery didn’t know what this meant, but he pressed on. “Don’t you have spies? Agents within the Temple—some that can tell us what the Collossum say at this gathering?”
“They’ve all been found out and killed, in the most brutal fashions, and that was only after many days of torture.”
“Did they give up anything?” Layanna asked.
“Oh, yes. Another reason for the frequent raids. But because of them we learned much about the Collossum, about their plans. It’s one reason we were able to elude them, to steal back pieces for the Device that we had lost. It was worth the sacrifice, at least to us. I can’t vouch for the dead. None of that changes the fact that we can’t prepare for what we can’t see coming. The Collossum meet within the next ten days.”
“Infiltrate the Temple,” Avery said. “You have many followers.”
“As I said,” Yaslen explained, with dwindling patience, “they’re all known to the Collossum. Not only that, but the loyal ones—not the extended families; we can’t trust them—but our true followers, they’ve been baptized by us in our rituals, which were established before the war ... and which we now regret. You see, the Collossum have developed techniques for identifying our baptismal signatures on humans. It leaves an imprint they can recognize.”