Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

  "Watch out for this floor," he said, voice a low buzz in her earbug. "Like the walls, it is dangerously slick. There is very little traction."

  Gretchen looked down at the dusty surface. A mirror image of her cloak, mask and rebreather stared back through a gray film. "Okay," she said, testing the surface with her boot. Sliding her foot from side to side elicited a queasy feeling like slipping on new ice. Pressing directly down seemed to gain some purchase. Ahead of her, Hummingbird was moving very slowly, taking his time and placing each foot with careful precision. Gretchen followed with equal care, keeping to the opposite wall.

  The sloped passage turned to enter a second chamber at an angle. Hummingbird paused just outside the junction, risking a quick look inside before beckoning for Anderssen to join him. Gretchen moved gingerly to his side — her boots kept wanting to slip out from under her — hands grimly tight on the handle and stock of the Sif.

  This room seemed to have no ceiling — or none she could see — and three smooth walls. The fourth, opposite them, was rough and unfinished. Gretchen's mouth tightened, making out irregular markings on the wall — inset spirals, whorls of raised, grooved rock — and she hissed in warning. At the base of the wall were scattered a number of cylinders.

  "There." She pointed, indicating a section of bare stone which had been broken open. Hand-sized rocks lay in an untidy pile at the foot of the wall. Boot prints scuffed an ancient layer of dust. "Russovsky took the embedded cylinder away."

  Without waiting for Hummingbird to respond, overcome by her own curiosity, Gretchen walked stiffly across the floor to the nearest cylinder. The artifact seemed much the same as the one Clarkson had cut open on the ship — a third of a meter long, four or five centimeters across — and the exterior was encrusted with the same kind of lime-scaling. Very gently, Anderssen nudged the device with the muzzle of the Sif, making the thing skitter across the impeccably smooth floor. The cylinder did not burst open.

  She could feel Hummingbird's tension from the doorway, but Gretchen ignored him for the moment, moving to the cavity broken in the stone. Up close, she saw the wall was raw irregular rock, rising up through the floor at an angle and vanishing into impenetrable darkness overhead. The entire surface was crowded with fossils — more of the anemonelike structures, the fluted curl of something like a snail, serrated ridges indicating a swimmer with multiple spines. A flattened, bifurcated cone. Scorch-marks surrounded the ragged opening where small blasting charges had been used to split open the limestone.

  "What made this place?" Gretchen whispered into her throat mike as she leaned close to examine the surface of the ancient sediment. She could see hundreds of specimens within arm's reach — a glorious view into a lost, dead world. "Did something survive after the valkar fled into hiding?"

  "Ghosts." Hummingbird hesitated, remaining crouched in the entranceway. "You've seen what lived — the microflora — but they did not make this shrine. This is memory made solid."

  "How?" Anderssen backed away from the wall, swinging the gun to cover the rest of the room. "You mean like Russovsky?"

  Hummingbird waved for her to get behind him once she reached the archway. "I have not seen this before myself," he said in a low voice, "but the pyramid contains references to such things. The valkar is dreaming, but it is not powerless. A subtle influence extends throughout this world, power seeping from the hidden heart. Even when the crust was shattered and remade, not all memories of what lived here before died." He began to back up into the hallway. Nervous, Gretchen followed.

  A white frost began to form on her breather mask, which was worrying. The night air of Ephesus was far below freezing, but the respirator should be trapping the water vapor in her breath. Only CO2 should be escaping. "Crow, something's happening…it's getting very, very cold."

  Hummingbird turned up the intensity of his wand and raised the light high. Shadows fled away down the passage.

  "There's something here," the nauallis hissed in alarm, staring intently around at the glassy walls. Gretchen tried to hurry, but the glassy floor immediately betrayed her. One foot flew out and she crashed down hard on her right hip. A gasp of pain burst from her throat. The barrel of the Sif banged on the floor and the weapon flew from her fingers. The nauallis flinched, but kept up his steady, careful pace toward the outer room.

  "Anderssen, quit playing about and get up," he hissed.

  Gretchen tried to rise, but her hands slipped on the mirrored floor and she spun helplessly. One boot hit the wall and skittered away. Even as she groped for some kind of purchase, she saw a spreading reflection of grayish light spill across the slanted wall. The butt of the Sif hit her head. Gretchen twisted into a roll and flopped over onto her stomach. Grasping fingers closed around the weapon and her boot struck the wall square enough to stop abruptly. She looked up.

  Hummingbird had backed past her in his flat-footed crouch. The little gun was pointing into the strange gray light, absurdly dwarfed by the bulk of his gloved hands. Gretchen twisted her head around and her eyes went wide. Reflex twitched the Sif into aiming position.

  The passage was filling with a steady gray radiance. An indeterminate crepuscular color shone from the air. The doorway to the room of the sea had vanished in the endlessly repeating reflections of the mirrored walls, floor and ceiling. Where the gray existed, there was nothing else — no shadow, no stone, no edges or divisions. Gretchen realized, with a chill start, the light was moving rapidly toward her, spilling along the passage in a colorless tide.

  "That's not light," she shouted into the comm, trying to scrabble backwards along the mirror-bright floor. The lead edge of the radiance was almost touching her flailing boots. Her finger twitched on the firing bead of the Sif. "It's something else!"

  Hummingbird's answer was drowned out by a sharp blast. The shockgun rocked against her shoulder as a canister burst from the muzzle. Gretchen oofed and the recoil flung her down the hallway, legs and arms windmilling. She slammed into Hummingbird and they both flew back through the slanted doorway into the outer chamber. Behind them, a high-pitched z-z-zing ended in a blast of flame and light. Out of the corner of her eye Gretchen caught sight of the gray radiance rippling and twisting like a torn blanket in the strobe-light eruption of a hundred and sixteen individually packaged munitions.

  In a cloud of dust, Anderssen untangled herself from the nauallis, hands working the reloading mechanism. Gretchen felt the heavy, solid thunk of a new canister levering into the firing chamber. Hummingbird scrambled up from the spreading dust as well, half-blinded by his disordered kaffiyeh.

  "Clever," he barked sarcastically over a comm channel hissing with static and the same kind of high warbling wail Gretchen had heard in the cave on Mount Prion. "You must have done well in physics… Ai! Run!"

  Gretchen was still raising the shockgun to cover the tunnel entrance when the nauallis bolted for the archway leading into the canyon. A shout of dismay strangled in her throat as the radiance boiled out of the passage. She caught a brief, fragmentary glimpse of a cloud of rock chips, bits of metal and what seemed to be frozen flame suspended within the advancing gray.

  "Crap!" Gretchen sprinted for the doorway and leaped through the opening, hands protecting her head. The roar of static in her earbug was deafening and she slapped the comm off. Both feet hit the dust, sending up twin plumes of heavy yellow. Staggering, Gretchen ran across the bowl and scrambled up the tilted slab on the far side.

  In the darkness, she lost sight of Hummingbird among a jerking, disorienting blur of canyon walls and sandy cavities among glassy-smooth boulders. Damning his cowardly name, she slid across another slab and dropped down onto a wide, gravel-strewn moraine. Wheezing for breath, Gretchen jogged up the slope and at the top she turned, nervous hands checking her belt, the sling of the shockgun, her rebreather — all the tools she needed to survive. A cough died in her throat.

  The radiance had spilled out into the canyon bottom. Now, from a distance, the thing looked nothing like any ligh
t or illumination she'd ever seen. Strikingly, there were no shadows or reflections cast by the color. Instead, the already dark canyon dimmed as the shape grew among the boulders and flooded from the doorway. Gretchen adjusted her goggles, but there was no change save in infrared, where she hissed in surprise to see the edges of the formless gray merging with the subzero night while bright points of heat blazed in the center of the mass. But even those sparks were dying as she watched.

  "Oh, no," she whispered, backing up. The Sif was in her hands again, but Anderssen realized with a grim certainty the gun was useless. The fading heat sources were the still-exploding flechettes she'd fired into the color, being avidly consumed by this…this…"What is this thing? Hummingbird!"

  There was no answer on the dead comm. Gretchen turned and ran as fast as she dared, scrambling past rounded anthracite boulders and slogging through deep drifts of sand and dust. A hundred heartbeats passed and suddenly, as she dodged between two menhirlike stones, a pair of powerful hands seized Gretchen and swung her aside, into a pocket of shadow in the greater darkness. She yelped, swinging the stock of the Sif around in a sharp blow to the unseen figure's head. The honeycombed plastic thudded into something solid. A glowbean flared to life and Gretchen found herself facing a wincing Hummingbird.

  "Where…" Anderssen tried turning her comm back on. "…have you been? What is that thing in the canyon?"

  "A hungry dream," Hummingbird said, though the staccato warble and keening in the background of the channel nearly drowned him out. "Or rather, what a current at the edge of the valkar's dream made in this waking world."

  "A dream?" Gretchen fought against a fierce desire to smash the butt of the shockgun repeatedly into the man's face until he made sense. "Dreams don't have form, idiot bird! They don't eat up explosive munitions like toasted maize and come looking for more!"

  Hummingbird pushed the muzzle of the Sif away from his face with a fingertip. "Even dreaming, the valkar distorts the world with the weight of its presence. Even these dead stones retain some memory of a once-living world." He slapped a gloved hand against the glossy obsidian rising up above them. "Nothing survived the devastation intact. But you saw the effect Russovsky's stone had on the organism in the cave — even the pattern memory of an often-used artifact could stir the formless to take shape. This world is rife with parched, formless memories."

  Hummingbird stopped, tensing. Gretchen turned, hefting the Sif onto her shoulder, muzzle down. Gun useless, she thought with very faint amusement. Make a note for Bandao. Good for feeding colorless light.

  "I was very foolish to come here — Hsst! Something is coming."

  Outside their tiny shelter, the gloom in the canyon — barely disturbed by the thin ribbon of brilliant, unwinking stars high above — deepened. Gretchen fought down a desire to bolt from their meager shelter. Hummingbird's fist closed on her shoulder in painful counterpoint to the static roaring in her earbug.

  The color was there suddenly, gliding out from behind a house-sized boulder. Again the gray radiance did not extend beyond an indistinct, wavering shape. Gretchen's eyes widened, taking in a burning-hot point drifting within something like a bifurcated cone with a forest of tentacular legs moving restlessly beneath. She focused her goggles on the hot centerpoint and saw a flechette tumbling in place, hissing and spitting slow fire. The metallic sheathing was rapidly disintegrating. Apparently unaware of them, the color drifted past, a gray cutout against a flat velvet background.

  Hummingbird's fingers clasped her wrist and the comm channel fell silent. He leaned close, pressing his mask against hers. "We have to get away from here or we'll be fuel too."

  Nodding, Gretchen peered out around the corner, saw nothing — no wavering, indeterminate blotches of lightless color — and slipped out, weaving her way through the debris scattered at the mouth of the canyon. Hummingbird was right behind her.

  Heedless of what might see them — if the color had eyes or something passing for an organ of sight — they ran up the broad, open slope flanking the entrance to the slot. Anderssen immediately started wheezing again. Her leg muscles sparked with pain and she nearly collapsed at the top of the ridge. Hummingbird caught her arm, dragging Gretchen to her feet.

  "Run," he barked, voice a barely audible squeak in the thin air. "Don't — "

  Gretchen looked back, trying to catch her breath.

  Amorphous gray shapes were emerging from the mouth of the canyon. Not all were cone-shaped — some shifted and distorted in the brief moment of her glance — and others strode swiftly on long, stalklike legs. A sensation of hostile desire struck Gretchen like a physical blow, though at such a distance there should have been no way for her to ascertain expression or intent.

  She turned and ran, head down, forcing cramping legs and thighs to bound across rocky, uneven ground. Hummingbird loped at her side, keeping pace, though Gretchen guessed the old man could easily leave her behind.

  They were within sight of the cave — she could see both ultralights outlined by a soft glow against the night — when a gray shape raced past on dozens of insectile legs and spun to face them. Hummingbird drew up as Gretchen stumbled to a halt, surrounded by a drifting cloud of dust and gasping for air. She looked around only seconds later and the radiance was all around them in shimmering, pearlescent sheets. A trickle of cold pure fear in the back of her throat made Gretchen's teeth clench.

  Hummingbird settled back on his heels, shifting his weight on the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Gretchen was suddenly struck by a sense of his calm solidity. Does anything disturb him? she wondered wildly, fighting to keep from swinging the useless gun toward the enemy. The sight of the terrible gray hanging in the air made her feel weak and small and powerless. Is he ever afraid?

  "Tla xihualhuian," his voice echoed over the comm, woven into a rising and falling storm of static and queer shrieking wails. The nauallis's hand extended, clenched tight into a fist. Grains of newly-crushed powder dribbled into the dark air. "Tlazohpilli, Centeotl! Ticcehuiz cozauhqui yollohtli. Quizaz xoxouhqui tlahuelli, cozauhqui tlahuelli!"

  The Mйxica's voice grew stronger with each syllable. Gretchen's distracted comprehension slid away from the barely-understandable words. They were in a strange, archaic-sounding dialect — she recognized a few of the words — yellow and green and wrath.

  "Do not move," Hummingbird said, the sound of the chant still ringing in his voice. "Become still."

  Gretchen stared at him in horror. The nauallis was settling to his knees, back straight and shoulders square. Around them, the belt of the gray was advancing through the air like ink spilled into clear water. The bright points of heat were gone. In infrared the malicious cloud had faded almost to invisibility. Her heart hammering, Gretchen forced incredulous words between clenched teeth.

  "Are you insane? They're going to drink us up like a sponge! Get up!"

  "No." Hummingbird placed his hands on both knees, eyes invisible in shadow, his face a faintly gleaming mask of dim fire. "Let them come…"

  "Never," Gretchen snarled, swinging away from the old man. Before he could react, she sprinted away, aiming for a space where the drifting radiance seemed thinnest. At the same time, her finger squeezed the firing bead on the Sif and there was a tinny crack as another flechette cylinder accelerated down the fat barrel and soared away into the night sky.

  Anderssen tried to leap the curdling indistinct color but failed, plowing through a thin drifting sheet. Immediately, she felt a chill, numbing shock. Gretchen staggered, nearly twisting her ankle on a hidden rock, then caught herself and fled. Gray clung to her legs and torso like the shredded remains of a gauze quilt or a thin paper banner. Against her black cloak and z-suit, the color shimmered pale and lifeless — fish scale without rainbows, a dead iridescence — but did not fall away as she ran. Cold blossomed in her side, cutting through the layers of insulation and radiation shielding built into the suit.

  Off in the distance, the canister blew apart, filling the night wi
th a bright, sharp blossom of red and orange. Hundreds of tiny explosions followed, the paltry air robbing their roar and clamor of its full-bodied rage. A twisting cloud of sand and grit billowed up into the black sky, lit from below by the fading reflection of the explosions.

  Gretchen managed another twenty strides and then collapsed with a thin, despairing cry. A cloud of the omnipresent dust puffed up around her. Color dripped from her legs and stomach like fresh steam rising from a still-unfrozen lake in a high country winter. Muscles spasmed, clenching tight within her skin. Blinded by needlelike pain, Gretchen tried to force her legs and arms to move, but wave after wave of nervefire crushed her down into the sand and gravel again.

  Hummingbird remained sitting amid the writhing circle of gray, eyes closed, his heartbeat steady as a temple bell calling the faithful to prayer. The color drew closer, puddling and seeping across the ground, still shadowless, emitting no light save the heatless glare of its own substance. Gray washed across his knees, his hands, up his arms. The nauallis's body shivered slightly, then grew still as the colorless tide mounted to cover his broad chest and then his face.

  Choking, her mouth coppery with blood, Gretchen felt sweat freezing on her clammy skin beneath the tight grip of the z-suit. The dreadful color was pooling around her, covering her arms and torso, blotting out her sight of the sky. A single jewel-bright star gleamed for a moment amid the gray before being swallowed up.

  Oh blessed sister, what do I do? Gretchen felt her body slow, leached of warmth, robbed by creeping, icy fingers. Her heart was still racing wildly and panic threatened to drown her mind as her body was being smothered by the color clouding around her. Stupid old man! We shouldn't have gone down there…

  Then, across a sputtering flood of near-comprehensible static and the tinny warbling of countless invisible birds, she heard the nauallis singing in his deep, slow voice.

  "Nic-quix-tiz," the words came, somehow clear and distinct amid all the noise and fury rolling around her, "nic-toh-tocaz nit-lama-caz-qui nina-hual-tecuti. Niquit-tiz tlama-caz-qui, pat-tecatl, tollo-cuepac-tzin."