CrossTown

by Loren W. Cooper

  What did it say about me that I had let no one close except my slaves?

  Turning away from that line of thought, I descended at last to a long, narrow causeway. Bleached white like dry bone, the causeway stretched endlessly over a glassy, obsidian plain like the back of the Worm Ouroboros. Points of light burned deep in the rock like captive suns. Still I followed the crimson thread further, deeper than I had ever traveled on barren Roads of forgotten possibility. I passed a chain of worlds burned to their root, hanging in the sky like a vast necklace of sallow harvest moons, the sickly glow of multispectrum radiation providing the only light in the dark waste that stretched around me into an infinite distance, the only sound in my ears the harsh rhythm of my own breath, cycled and recycled through the nanoprocessors in the suit. And still the heart of stone led me further into old places, dead places, until I found myself climbing a long, twisting stair of dark stone that twined around a tall column of basalt like a single strand of clinging ivy.

  I crested the column. Harsh, actinic light flared around me. I looked down from the top of the column into a valley lit by the blazing head of a vast comet. It hung tail down over the valley like the gods’ own sword of Damocles. No sun burned in the vault of the heavens. The stars could but peek shyly through the azure light of the comet.

  The crimson thread of the Way faded into the darkness of the valley. I released the crimson thread and descended the stair of the tower to the valley floor. The survival suit flaked away from my body and swirled down to the hard stone of the valley floor in a light rain of ashes. I shook my head and dusted my clothes with my hat, remnants of the suit coming off me in small puffs of ash.

  The Road I had walked had evidently taxed the suit beyond its capabilities, the molecular machines that composed it unable to recover from whatever technological plagues I had passed through. Corvinus had not meant for me to return the same way I had arrived. Why had he not come himself? Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to risk his own destruction when he had a perfectly gullible apprentice to talk into making the journey for him. Though admittedly, the journey to that point had been long, but not particularly hazardous.

  I could feel no trace of movement in the air. The taste of the air in that place was perfectly clean, perfectly sterile, and perfectly empty. It tasted as if it had not passed through the lungs of a living being for millennia.

  As I set my foot on the floor of the valley, I felt the heart of stone throb within my grip. I glanced down, startled, pausing to examine the stone in the light of the great comet. Cracks fissured its surface, like jagged tracks of countless, tiny lightning strikes. Drops of fluid, black in the light of the comet, beaded at those cracks and ran slowly down the surface of the stone.

  The heart throbbed again, pulsing in my hand, and more fluid pushed its way up through the fissures. I stepped deeper into the valley, watching the shadows, studying the layout of the valley. Perhaps I would find an entrance to the place where the Nephilim had been brought into being from the frailty of human flesh.

  I watched everything as I moved. Chimereon had spoken of security. The Way here had been difficult, but not so difficult that I believed the worst had passed.

  The heart throbbed again. I took another step. Points of icy heat touched my hand where I held the heart. Furious, empty hunger tore at the prison I had built for it out of the strength of my will. The stolen hunger of the Shadow Hound strained at the bonds I had placed upon it as scalding, dark blood from the heart of stone ran over my clenched fingers.

  The walls surrounding the narrow valley shifted within the shadows that held them. Curious formations of rock, almost like sculptures of the human form, appeared out of the landscape before me in the same way a motionless animal is slowly etched into existence out of concealing brush before the hunter’s watchful eye.

  I took another step, in time with the next throb of the heart. The icy heat drew itself in lines down my hand toward my wrist. The ache of the sensation went straight to the bone, but faded quickly to numbness. The black hunger within continued to grow.

  I looked at my hand—the dark fluid seeping from the heart had covered it over and begun to work its way down my wrist. My fingers were coated, and a network of black traceries wrapped my hand to the wrist and below. None of the fluid dripped down to the ground. Instead, it clung to my flesh.

  I didn’t like that one bit.

  The heart throbbed. I took another step deeper into the valley and the shadow. For the first time, I heard something other than the sounds that I made myself. A deep tone blurred and danced on the edge of perception, a subsonic grumble welling up around me.

  Shadow surrounding me, I drew upon my power over the darkness and looked deeper into it, studying the sculptures in the rock. The nearest took the form of a man, his handsome features contorted by great pain, his mouth open in a scream. His legs twined together, joining seamlessly with rock foaming up hungrily from the floor of the valley. In the shadow I could make out the finest detail, and what I saw left me shaken. Everything on the man had been formed in perfection, down to the individual hairs of his curling beard. No mortal artisan could craft so well. No mortal hand or eye had framed that fearful symmetry.

  The heart throbbed again. I took another step. I could and yet could not feel the heart as it moved in my relentless grip. I could not open my fingers to release it. The fire and ice of the blood of the heart of stone reached my elbow. My lower arm, from the halfway point of the forearm to the tips of my fingers, was lost to the power of the heart’s blood.

  I pulled my gaze away from the first statue to look up the considerable dark length of the valley, and felt despair. Hundreds of statues, each as perfect as the first I had studied, each completely different in terms of dress and appearance, stood in ranks along the walls of the valley. All of them appeared to have been carved from stalagmites. The stone of the valley floor reached up around the bodies before they lifted to the clean definition of perfect detail. On some figures the rough stone stopped at the ankles. Others looked as if they had been carved only from the waist up, everything below that point blending into natural, untouched stone. I looked back at the entrance to the valley, and in what I had taken to be a pillar as I had passed, I could now see a face. The length of the stone appeared to have been subtly shaped to form a shroud around a tall, slender figure. Toward the top of the pillar the shroud of stone dropped away from a woman’s face of incredible beauty, most remarkable for its peace in the midst of that sea of frozen agony. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was open, as if she were singing.

  The heart pulsed again, ice and fire working its way up my arm as if through the bone. The heart’s blood crawled past the midpoint of my upper arm.

  I did not believe that the lifelike craftsmanship of those statues derived from mere coincidence. I had tried to release the heart of stone. I had failed. I tried to pry open my fingers with my free hand, but my fingers were as cold and hard and unyielding as granite where they locked around the heart. I attempted to turn, to flee that place. The act of shifting my feet to turn my body felt as if I were fighting a mighty rushing torrent of pure force. At the same time, tendrils of pain and cold and heat increased the speed of their relentless advance, spreading to enclose my shoulder in fingers of molten ice.

  The heart beat again. I fought and held myself to a standstill. Bloody lines of cold fire touched my chest. The sound at the edge of my hearing grew louder, taking on a deep tone of primal discontent, well past the fuzzy limits of perception.

  I tried to reach for a Way, but a roaring, white static filled those senses. I understood then that I had no such option. I could not escape this place so easily. I could not flee the way I had come. I had discovered the nature of the ancient security measures too late. My only course lay ahead, past the statues, toward that immeasurable goal faced by every tormented face. If I failed this test, I would become one of the ranked, silent figures.

  I turned forward and set my will to driving my progress. I managed
two steps before the next pulse of the heart. Lines of fiery cold crept out over my shoulder and touched my chest below my extended arm. I could not move my arm at all by that time. My arm crooked before me, the heart pulsing in my frozen grip, held slightly below the level of my eyes like a lamp fixed to guide my path.

  The heart throbbed again. I had managed three steps. Fire and ice crawled through the framework of my bones, moving through the network of my ribcage to reach my spine more quickly than the lines of power that traced along my skin. The pain and the power of it numbed my chest, filling every breath with icy needles of agony.

  The sounds grew louder. The air around me hissed with a continuous cacophony. I turned my head as the first traces of the blood touched the base of my neck. I saw slow movement on the angry lips of the nearest statue.

  When the temples of Greece had commissioned likenesses of Zeus, that statue could have been the model for the artist in everything but his face. His face seemed more appropriate to Prometheus. His muscles stood out under his skin as he strained against invisible bonds. Under a mask of pain, his face held an angry, mocking edge. He stood in a pool of shadow, his lips moving slowly.

  I took another step as the heart pulsed again and the black tide of blood swept higher. I knew that I would not make it to the end of the valley. I had allowed myself to be distracted. My progress had slowed. I had too far yet to go before I reached my goal.

  I made his voice out then, among all the others. The words were still a grumbling mutter of thunder, and impossibly slow, but understandable. “Fool. Where is your Legion?”

  The heart beat again as I listened to him and the pain of the blood reached down to my waist and up to the edge of my jaw.

  The chorus of voices came in the background, mocking, raging, hating. The nearest statue laughed, almost at normal speed. “Once, twice, and eternally damned. You thought to take the power without lives to spend? Nothing is without price.”

  I remembered what Chimereon had told me about the Nephilim having been created from sorcerers. I had not fully comprehended until I stood in the valley itself that the finished product might have been something other than a more powerful sorcerer. When the Jigsaw Man had sought to turn my Legion against me, he had not lied to them. He had known more about the trial than I. The candidates had given the members of their Legions to stoke the fires of power high enough to take them through the valley of darkness. They had sacrificed the members of their Legion on the altar of power. Given the choice between sacrificing the Legion and surrendering to the pain, I had a strong suspicion that I would have chosen survival. Truthfully, power would have been a consideration as well. What would that sacrifice have made of me? What of these trapped, damned souls? Had they made the choice not to sacrifice their slaves, or had their Legions not been enough? Once past the valley, what would I find on the other side?

  The heart pulsed again, the blood reached up to my temple and down to my thighs, and I had not taken a single step. Shouts and screams and cries of pain and abuse surrounded me. I saw the statues writhing in agony as they mocked me. I saw triumph in the eyes of the nearest, the man who could have modeled as a failed god. “Once you stop it is the end. Here, in this place, the end is also the beginning.”

  As the blood leached through the bones of my skull, the world became a rage of pain. His laughter surrounded me. I knew then that had I not freed the Legion, I would gladly have given them to the darkness in that place to free myself from the pain. Even the agony of the snake’s venom had not been worse than the blood of the heart of stone as it clenched around my skull like a fist of molten iron with fingers of permafrost.

  I lost control then, as darkness met darkness. The growing hunger I had pent up slipped its bonds. I raised my eyes to the laughing, mocking, failed god, twisting in his pall of shadow and pain, and my lips pulled back from my teeth in something more feral than a smile. I stretched my hand out toward him until I touched the deepest fabric of the shadow that covered him.

  I called upon the darkness, drew strength from him, and life. The pain receded. I managed a step sideways, closer to him. His eyes opened wide, betrayal and fear displacing the rage on his face as he felt the touch of my black hunger. He screamed and fought as I closed and fed. When I pulled away the fire and the ice had receded from my temple to the line of my jaw. The sounds around me muted and diminished. Crumbling fragments of weathered rock were all that remained where he had been standing.

  It had not been enough.

  The heart beat again as I stepped deeper into shadow and laid my hand upon the next failed candidate. Another man, he too screamed and fought, but slowly.

  With the next beat of the heart, the blood receded again. I worked my way down that side of the valley, pushing the heart’s blood further and further back, swallowing the trapped souls of that place into a deeper and more final darkness. I sacrificed them, men and women alike, to prevent myself from sharing their fate. I killed them to live.

  Not one of them came to me gladly. As terrible as their existence had become, they clung to it ferociously. The more intense their pain, the more they fought against the end.

  I pushed down, through the shadows of the valley. I crossed over to the other side as needed, harvesting as I walked. I reached the deepest place in the valley, where the darkness became absolute. Trapped souls clustered thickly there. I fed richly. The hungry darkness I had held restrained had gained a momentum of its own. I could not stop it. I did not want to stop it.

  I forced the last of the blood back to the heart itself, then made my way up the last little slope. Light fought against the shadow of the valley. A great conflagration raged beyond the last crevice of the rock, where the last bastion of the shadows held the light at bay and the light of the crevice kept the darkness of the valley imprisoned.

  I had come to the source of the power of the Nephilim, where the Rites had made gods of men.

  Behind me, the screams had diminished. Few of the trapped souls remained. Only those I had passed in my initial progress had evaded my hunger, as I had driven continually down and forward. Above and behind their voices, I heard a single voice of great purity singing, making music of marvelous beauty to fill that terrible place.

  Fear and shame rose within me. The light oppressed me. I battled fear of the light. My appetite had grown with each taking. My antipathy to the light had also grown as I had descended into the darkness. Somehow I knew that if I left without facing the light I would be giving myself to that darkness. Whatever remained would have been more the darkness than the self I could even then feel slipping away before relentless hunger.

  I threw myself into the light in a sudden rush, like diving into a bonfire, in an urgent need to get it over with all at once. The light fell down around me. It burned. The darkness clung to me. Shadows dripped from my body, hissing in the light as they boiled away. I approached the crevice that ended the valley. I looked out onto a vast plain of white stone. Azure light burned in the heart of the plain like a captive sun. I stepped through the crevice and the great flame rose above me like a piece of eternity left from the moment of creation.

  The heart of stone beat steadily in my grip as I crossed from the darkness into the light, the rhythm accelerating until it matched the hammering of my own heart. I stepped out across the plain, black trails of shadow streaming out around my limbs.

  I walked down to the border of the firestorm, but no heat rose around me. I stood at the edge of creation, but no light touched me. I looked down through the well of time, watching all the myriad days of eternity pass me by.

  The darkness and the hunger and the fear within me gave way to something deeper. I could hear the flames calling to me, singing an indescribably beautiful song that blended with the music of the solitary singer at the entrance of the valley.

  I hesitated before walking down into the bonfire. A nameless yearning drove me forward despite my fear. A hunger to know, hunger for the root of things, a hunger to see to the heart of th
ings, overcame the darker hunger and the fear that had carried me through the valley of shadows.

  The light took me. Gods, the light!

  It took me as I stepped into it, its power palpable as a heat I had not felt and an ice I had not expected. It burned through me. A pure brilliance coursed through my skin and muscles, flashing through blood and solid bone without even noticing me. I would have screamed if I’d had the strength. The shadow hunger within me withered and changed under the inescapable force of the light, clinging to me like a weeping child.

  Heat seared me, ice shattered me. My body became fuel for the flames. Even the shadow billowed out away from me, a penumbra consumed by the light. The raging flame roared with a voice beyond sound, swallowing all other sound, as the light became a sea of azure fire filling my vision, filling the world of my senses.

  The shadow fled me. I had no other lives to give in place of my own. I reached instinctively for the Legion, but I was alone. I turned to my purpose for refuge, my determination to solve the mystery of my master’s death, to bring vengeance upon his killers. Compared to the purity of the light, such memories and purposes were a slender reed. They crumbled away beneath me almost as soon as I put my hand to them.

  My blood boiled away. My bones crumbled. I stood in the flames a naked shade. I was a flickering candle to the force of the light that burned all around and through me.

  I reached further back, into the time before I came to Cross-Town. I looked over the rocky shores and wine-dark seas and wooded hills of my home. I’d been a hunter then. I’d been a herdsman as well, a lover of the chase, and an eater of meat. Then I’d turned to hunting game of a less physical sort and took to enslaving ghosts instead of herding cattle. I’d lost myself on the wild, stormy seas, in the winds and the darkness. Clinging to the wreckage of my boat, I’d fought off the specter of death with a determination and a hunger for life that went deeper than any hunger the Shadow Dweller had brought to me, until I came at last to the shores of CrossTown and made my own way through its wilderness of possibilities, guided always by that lust for life that had preserved me even in the worst of my days.