by Dan Simmons
He knew now that the things could see in the infrared, so darkness alone would not hide him, but the creatures were in a hurry—scrabbling in the opposite direction from Marina’s tower—and none of them turned the IR-sensors on their chests in his direction in the three seconds it took them to scuttle out of sight.
Heart pounding, Daeman sprinted the last hundred yards to his mother’s tower where it rose above the west curve of the crater. The hand-cranked elevator basket wasn’t at street level, of course—Daeman could just make it out some twenty-five stories higher along the column of scaffolding, where the residential stacks began above the old shopping esplanade. There was a bell rope hanging at the bottom of the elevator scaffolding to alert the tower residents to a guest’s presence, but a full minute of pulling on Daeman’s part showed no lights coming on up there nor any answering tugs.
Still gasping from his run through the streets, Daeman squinted up into the rain and considered returning to Invalid Hotel. It would be a twenty-five-floor climb—much of it in the old dark stairwells—with absolutely no guarantee that the fifteen stories below the abandoned esplanade would be free of voynix.
Many of the former faxnode communities based in the ancient cities or high towers had to be abandoned after the Fall. Without electricity—old-style humans didn’t even know where the current had been generated or how it was distributed—the lift shafts and elevators wouldn’t work. No one was going to climb and descend two hundred and fifty feet—or much more for some tower communities such as Ulanbat, with its two-hundred-story Circles to Heaven—every time they needed to seek food or water. But, amazingly, some survivors still lived in Ulanbat, even though the tower rose in a desert where no food could be grown and no edible animals wandered as game. The secret there was the tower-core faxnodes every six floors. As long as other communities continued to barter food for the lovely garments that Ulanbat had always been famous for—and which they had in surplus after one-third of their population was killed by voynix before they learned how to seal off the upper floors—the Circles to Heaven would continue to exist.
There were no faxnodes in Marina’s tower, but the survivors up there had shown amazing ingenuity in adapting a small exterior servitor elevator to occasional human use, rigging the cables to a system of gears and cranks so that as many as three people could be lifted up from the street in a sort of basket. The elevator only went to the esplanade level, but that made the last ten stories more climbable. This wouldn’t work for frequent trips—and the ride itself was hair-raising, with startling jerks and occasional dips—but the hundred or so residents of his mother’s tower had more or less seceded from the surface world, relying on their high terrace gardens and water accumulators, sending their representatives down to market twice a week and having little other intercourse with the world.
Why don’t they respond? He pulled on the bell rope another two minutes, waited another three.
There was a scrabbling echo from two blocks south, toward the wide boulevard there.
Make up your mind. Stay or go, but decide. Daeman stepped farther out into the street and looked up again. Lightning illuminated the spidery black buckylace supports and gleaming bamboo-three structures on the towers above the old esplanade. Several windows up there were illuminated by lanterns. From this vantage point, he could see the signal fires that Goman kept burning on his mother’s city-side terrace, in the shelter of the bamboo-three roof.
Scrabbling noises came from alleys to the north.
“To hell with it,” said Daeman. It was time to get his mother out of here. If Goman and all his pals tried to stop him from taking her to Ardis tonight, he was prepared to throw all of them over the terrace railing into the Crater if he had to. Daeman set the safeties on the crossbow so he wouldn’t put two pieces of barbed iron into his foot by mistake, went into the building, and began climbing the dark stairway.
He knew by the time he reached the esplanade level that something was terribly wrong. The other times he’d come here in recent months—always arriving in daylight—there were guards here with their primitive pikes and more sophisticated Ardis bows. None tonight.
Do they drop their esplanade guard at night? No, that made no sense—the voynix were most active at night. Besides, Daeman had been here visiting his mother on several occasions—the last time more than a month ago—when he’d heard the guards changing through the night. He’d even stood guard once on the two a.m. to six a.m. shift, before faxing back to Ardis blurry-eyed and tired.
At least the stairway here above the esplanade was open on the sides; the lightning showed him the next rise or landing before he sprinted up the stairs or crossed a dark space. He kept the crossbow raised and his finger just outside the trigger guard.
Even before he stepped out onto the first residential level where his mother lived, he knew what he’d find.
The signal flames in the metal barrel on the city-side terrace were burning low. There was blood on the bamboo-three of the deck, blood on the walls, and blood on the underside of the eaves. The door was open to the first domi he came to, not his mother’s.
Blood everywhere inside. Daeman found it hard to believe that there had been this much blood in all the bodies of all the hundred-some members of the community combined. There were countless signs of panic—doors hastily barricaded, then the doors and barricades splintered, bloody footprints on terraces and stairways, shreds of sleeping clothes thrown here and there—but no real signs of resistance. No bloodied arrows or lances stuck in wooden beams after being thrown, their targets missed. There were no signs that weapons had been reached or raised.
There were no bodies.
He searched three other domis before working up the nerve to enter his mother’s. In each domi he found blood spattered, furniture shattered, cushions torn, tapestries ripped down, tables overturned, furniture stuffing strewn everywhere—blood on white feathers and blood on pale foam—but no bodies.
His mother’s door was locked. The old thumb locks had failed with the Fall, but Goman had replaced the automatic lock with a simple bolt and chain that Daeman had thought was too flimsy. It proved to be now. After several soft knocks with no answer. Daeman kicked hard three times and the door splintered and came out of its groove. He squeezed into the darkness, crossbow first.
The entryway smelled of blood. There was a light in the back rooms facing the crater, but almost none here in the foyer, hallway, or public anteroom. Daeman moved as silently as he could, his stomach convulsing at the stench of blood and slight ripples under his feet as he moved through unseen pools. He could see just well enough here to make sure there was nothing or no one waiting, and that there were no bodies underfoot.
“Mother!” His own cry alarmed him. Again. “Mother! Goman? Anyone?”
Wind stirred the chimes on the terrace beyond the living area, and although the crater and the city beyond the crater were mostly dark, lightning flashes illuminated the main sitting area. The blue and green silk tapestries he’d never loved but had grown so used to on the south wall had gained red-brown streaks and spatters. The nesting chair he’d always claimed when he was home—a body-molded womb of corrugated paper—had been shredded. There were no bodies. Daeman could only wonder if he was ready to see what he had to see here.
Swirls, trails, and smears of blood came in from the terrace and led from the common sitting room into the dining room where Marina loved to entertain at the long table. Daeman waited for the next flash of lightning—the storm had moved east and there were more seconds between each flash and the following thunder—and then he lifted the crossbow back to his shoulder and moved into the large dining room.
Three successive bolts of lightning showed him the room and its contents. There were no bodies as such. But on his mother’s twenty-foot-long mahogany table, a pyramid of skulls rose almost to the ceiling seven feet above Daeman’s head. Scores of empty eye sockets stared at him. The white of bone was like a retinal after-image between each lightning
flash.
Daeman lowered the heavy crossbow, clicked on the safety, and came closer to the pyramid. There was blood everywhere in the room except atop the table, which was pristine. In front of the pyramid of grinning, gaping skulls was an old turin cloth, spread wide with its embroidered circuitry centered in line with the topmost skull.
Daeman stepped up onto the chair he’d always sat in when at his mother’s table, and then stepped on the table itself, bringing his face up to the level of that highest skull of these hundred skulls. In the white flashes from the receding storm, he could see that all of the other skulls were picked clean, pure white, holding no fleshly remains of their victims. This top skull was not so clean. Several strands of curly red hair had been left—oh so deliberately left—like a topknot and more at the back of the skull.
Daeman had reddish hair. His mother had red hair.
He jumped down from the table, threw open the window wall, and staggered out onto the terrace, retching over the side into the single, red eye of the crater magma fifty miles directly below. He vomited again, and then again, and then several more times, even though he had nothing left in him to throw up. Finally he turned, dropped the heavy crossbow onto the floor of the terrace, rinsed his face and mouth with water from the copper basin his mother left hanging there from ornamental chains as a birdbath, and then he collapsed with his back to the bamboo-three railing, staring in through the open sliding window-door of the dining room.
The lightning was growing dimmer and less frequent, but as Daeman’s eyes adjusted, the red glow from the crater illuminated the curved backs of countless skulls. He could see the red hair.
Nine months ago, Daeman would have wept like the thirty-seven-year-old child he was. Now, though his stomach churned and some black emotion folded itself into a fist in his chest, he tried to think coolly.
He had no question about who or what had done this thing. Voynix did not feed, nor did they carry off their victims’ bodies. This was not random voynix violence. This was a message to Daeman, and only one creature in all of dark creation could send such a message. Everyone in this domi tower had died and been filleted like fish, skulls stacked like white coconuts, just so the message could be delivered. And from the stench-freshness of the blood, it had occurred only hours earlier, perhaps even more recently.
Leaving his crossbow lying where it fell for now, Daeman got to his hands and knees, and then to his feet—only because he did not want to further smear his hands in the gore on the terrace floor—and he walked into the dining room again, circling the long table, finally climbing to take down his mother’s skull. His hands were shaking. He did not feel like weeping.
Humans had only just recently learned how to bury their fellow humans. Seven had died at Ardis in the past eight months, six from voynix, one from some mysterious illness that had carried the young woman away in one feverish night. Daeman hadn’t known it was possible for old-style humans to contract illness or disease.
Should I take her back with me? Have some burial service out by the wall where Noman and Harman had directed us to create the cemetery for our dead?
No. Marina had always loved her domis here in Paris Crater better than anyplace else in the faxable world.
But I can’t leave her here with these other skulls, thought Daeman, feeling wave after wave of indescribable emotion surge through him. One of these other skulls is that bastard Goman.
He carried the skull back out onto the terrace. The rain had grown much more fierce, the wind had dropped off, and Daeman stood a long minute at the railing, letting the raindrops wet his face and further clean the skull. Then he dropped the skull over the edge of the railing and watched it fall toward the red eye below until the tiny white speck was gone.
He lifted the crossbow and started to leave—back through the dining room, the common area, the inner hall—then he paused.
It hadn’t been a sound. The pounding of the rain was so loud that he couldn’t have heard an allosaurus if it was ten feet behind him. He’d forgotten something. What?
Daeman went back into the dining room, trying to avoid the accusatory stares of the dozens of skulls—What could I have done? he asked silently. Died with us, they silently responded—and swept up the turin cloth.
He—it—had left the cloth here for some purpose. It and the table were the only things in the domi complex not smeared and spattered with human blood. Daeman stuffed the cloth into the side pocket of his anorak and went out of that place.
It was dark in the stairway down to the esplanade and even darker in the enclosed stairway for fifteen stories beneath the esplanade. Daeman did not even raise his crossbow to the ready. If it—he—was waiting for him here, so be it. It would be a contest of teeth and fingernails and rages.
Nothing waited there.
Daeman was halfway back to the Invalid Hotel fax pavilion, walking stolidly down the center of the boulevard in the pounding rain, when there came a crackling and crashing behind him.
He turned, went to one knee, and raised the heavy weapon to his shoulder. This was not its sound. It was silent on its horn-padded and yellow-taloned webbed feet.
Daeman raised his face and stared, jaw going slack. A spinning had appeared in the direction of the crater, somewhere between him and his mother’s domi tower. The thing was some hundreds of meters across and spinning rapidly. A form of lightning crackled around it like a crown of electrical thorns and rays of random light stabbed out from the sphere. The wet air was filled with rumbles that made the pavements shake. Shifting fractal designs filled the sphere until the sphere became a circle and the circle sank, ripping a building apart as it settled to the earth and then partially beneath the earth.
Sunlight flooded out of the circle now, but it was not any sunlight as ever seen from Earth. The circle stopped sinking with only one-fourth of it wedged into the ground like some giant portal. It was only two blocks away, filling the sky to the east. Air rushed toward it from behind Daeman at near-hurricane speeds, almost knocking him down in its loud, wailing rush.
There was a daylit world visible through that still vibrating three-quarters circle—a world of a tepidly lapping blue sea, red soil, rocks, and a mountain—no, a volcano, rising to impossible heights in front of an off-blue sky. Something very large and pink and gray and moist emerged from that tepid sea and appeared to scuttle toward the open hole on centipede-fast feet that looked like giant hands to Daeman’s eyes. Then the air in front of that view was filled with debris and dust as the winds raged, mixed, were absorbed, and died away.
Daeman stood there another minute, peering through the obscuring dust, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the diffused but still blinding sunlight streaming from the hole. The buildings of Paris Crater west of the hole—and the iron-armature thighs and emptied belly of the Enormous Whore—glinted in the cold, alien sunlight and then disappeared in the dust cloud broiling out of the hole. Other parts of the city remained invisible and wet, wrapped in night.
There came voynix scrabblings—urgent, many-clawed—from streets to the north and south.
Two voynix exploded out of a dark doorway on Daeman’s boulevard and rushed him on all fours, killing blades clattering.
He tracked them with his crossbow sight, led them, fired the first bolt into the leathery hood of the second voynix—it fell—and then fired his second bolt into the chest of the leading one. It fell but kept pulling itself closer.
Daeman carefully pulled two barbed, iron bolts from the pouch slung over his shoulder, reloaded, recocked, and shot both bolts into the thing’s nerve-center hump at a distance of ten feet. It quit crawling.
More scrabblings to the west and south. The reddish daylight from the hole was revealing everything on the street here. Daeman’s concealment of darkness was gone. Something bellowed from that rising dust cloud—making a sound like nothing Daeman had ever heard—deeper, more malignant, the incomprehensible growls sounding like some terrible language being bellowed in reverse.
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Not hurrying, Daeman reloaded again, looked one last time over his shoulder at the red mountain visible through the hole in Paris Crater’s sky and cityscape, and then he jogged west—not in panic—toward Invalid Hotel.
25
Noman was dying.
Harman went in and out of the small room on the first floor of Ardis Hall that had been converted into a makeshift—and largely useless—infirmary. There were books in there from which they could sigl anatomy charts and instructions for simple surgery, mending broken bones, etc., but no one but Noman had been proficient in dealing with serious wounds. Two of those buried in the new cemetery near the northwest corner of the palisade had died after days of pain in this same infirmary.
Ada stayed with Harman, had been by his side since he’d staggered through the north gate more than an hour earlier, often touching his arm or taking his hand as if reassuring herself he was really there. Harman had been treated for his wounds on the cot next to where Noman lay now—Harman’s wounds had been deep scratches, requiring a painful few stitches and an even more painful administration of their crude, homemade versions of antiseptic—including raw alcohol. But the unconscious Noman’s terrible wounds to his arm and scalp were too serious to be treated with only these few inadequate measures. They’d cleaned him as best they could, applied stitches to his scalp, used their antiseptics on the open wounds—Noman did not even return to consciousness when the alcohol was poured on—but the arm was too mauled, connected to his torso only by ragged strings of ligament, tissue, and shattered bone. They had stapled and bandaged, but already the bandages were soaked through with blood.