“Bit you?”
Raus ran his thick fingers over a deep cut that was already starting to seal from both ends. He wiped at the gray-green blood but the cut was already gone when Jav took a closer look.
Jav frowned but said nothing about the fresh, thin scar that decorated Raus’s cheek. “Well, you appear to be all right. What do you suggest we do?”
Raus rubbed absently at his new scar. “The path is a little far and taking it would rob us of any advantage of surprise. While Dark, the terrain poses little difficulty for us. Let’s drop down from here and approach the settlement from the west.”
Jav motioned for Raus to take the first step off the precipice. Raus gave him a half-suspicious look before doing so. Jav followed, and the two found themselves in a maze of sorts. Half-buried in snow, walls of dirty ice, sometimes translucent, sometimes opaque, formed an intaglio pattern that had perhaps been determined ages ago by run off from the mountain now behind them. The air was almost clear of snow down here, improving visibility substantially.
“That may not have been a good idea. This ice is old and hard and was just as likely to cut us in two as shatter beneath us.”
Jav nodded. “We’re okay.”
They wove their way through the blades of ice until they came to a dead end. Raus put both hands upon the ice and was about to rest his head against it in temporary defeat when he turned suddenly to Jav, a smile upon his lips. He turned back to the ice and pushed. Though it stretched up five or six meters, it could not stand against Raus’s new strength. The base groaned and made a series of sharp cracking sounds where Raus pushed, but the sheet toppled and shattered into a million shards when it crashed into another, sending a rain of freshly cut stained glass and stones of various size into the snow upon the ground, raising countless little plumes on impact.
“Very subtle,” Jav said, the sound of the shattering ice still echoing between and through the maze walls. “We’re sure to surprise them if we continue like this.”
Raus made a sour face. “Come on.”
“Yes, sir.”
They soon found themselves walking down a dry riverbed a hundred meters wide with banks that ranged in height from just over Jav’s head to veritable cliffs. Here the river had still been shallow. Dry spindly trees, bone-white and long-dead, decorated the banks at intervals like fossilized spiderwebs. There were skeletons strewn about—some in pieces, some half in the ground, some whole but in strange poses—all of them frozen and clinging to swords or spears where there were hands to hold them.
The snow had stopped falling almost completely now and the sky was a heavy, leaden gray that made one feel that it might suddenly burst, disgorging its entire volume of water, snow, or something foul.
A large black mass loomed up ahead, jutting from the bank on the right. Both had noticed, but stopped to stare at the now clearly visible wispy shapes that had challenged their senses before. They were dim white shadows of men and women, made of wind or water or both, fading into and out of existence, riding the air along the riverbed as though it were a thoroughfare. One passed them to start, but soon the riverbed was alive with ghosts that darted and streaked by them, pausing briefly to investigate, to sniff, to stare themselves, to laugh silently and disappear or resume their courses. Jav they seemed to regard as an oddity, but Raus commanded the most attention.
They were ghosts. When Jav or Raus tried to swat them away, their hands passed right through them, sometimes dispersing them like clouds of steam.
“I don’t think they can harm us, but I would feel more comfortable increasing our numbers,” Raus said.
“By all means. Better to be prepared.”
Raus took a deep breath, looked to the sky, and cried out. Immediately the sky responded, darkening and sending a single, cracked bolt of lightning into the riverbed. The lightning left a gleaming bowl similar to that left by their Tether Launch landings. It also dashed all the ghosts to mist. Some ghosts tentatively reformed and resumed their traffic and inspections, but these were somewhat furtive, and many were more preoccupied with the ground—with good reason.
Something deep within the earth began to thump rhythmically, causing the more-recently fallen snow to shake and settle lower and lower. The thumping increased in frequency and intensity until finally, a hundred hands at once pushed up through the snow or through the hard, frozen dirt. Corpses, well-preserved by the cold, climbed up from their ancient graves. Many were intact, many more were missing arms, legs, parts of their heads or torsos, but all were marked with glowing yellow eyes—eyes like bottled lightning—and a sick green, palpable miasma. The first hundred were joined by another and then another until the riverbed and the banks were crowded with animate corpses, their bodies groaning with trapped gasses, their long-unused joints and muscles creaking in protest to the stiffness instilled in them by the years and the cold.
The ghosts looked upon their risen fellows in terror, eyes and mouths wide in inaudible screams. The majority of the ghosts fled, but some lingered, hiding behind trees or large rocks to watch what might unfold.
“Let’s go see what this is up ahead,” Raus said, pointing to the black mass.
Jav nodded and the two started off through the sea of standing corpses.
Raus walked the length of the black shape, which rose up just above his head, running a hand along its surface. He looked at Jav, his face suddenly filled with a child’s excitement backed by mischief.
“Do you know what this is, Jav?”
Jav shook his head.
Raus started to pull at the black metal, but found it too pliable to his fingers. “It’s a boat.”
Jav cocked his head, even more confused by Raus’s excitement. “In a dry riverbed? Well, now!”
Raus shook his head dismissing the other’s sarcasm even as the corpses surrounded the exposed part of the boat and started to attempt to dislodge it. “No, not that kind of boat, a windram. It doesn’t need water to ride on.”
“You mean one of the flying boats you talked about?”
Raus nodded.
“So. . .?” Jav shook his head, still not understanding.
“One of the reasons—maybe the only real reason—the Emperor offered me a position with the Empire was the technology I had to offer. For the most part your Viscain technology far exceeds ours here on Sarsa, but the Lightning Gun intrigued the Emperor. If this boat is a windram and works the way it’s said to, then I think it, too, will be of great interest to the Emperor.”
“Or at least to Gilf Scanlan,” Jav said.
“Help me get it loose.”
They set about with the aid of their dead workforce to pulling the boat free.
After a few minutes of concerted pulling and coaxing, they had a boat, mostly intact, of lightweight black metal, thirty meters long, not including the three meter spar that sprouted from the prow and which was of a much harder, heavier metal. A gaping hole occupied the center of the craft from which a mast might normally have stood, but Raus was convinced that this was indeed a windram, which would need no mast.
Raus ducked under the hull and entered through the hole as the corpses set the craft down. Inside, the deck, one meter above the hull, was mostly gone, either destroyed by whatever had made the hole or eaten away by time and the elements. Part of the deck near the front remained, though, along with what Raus believed was the pilot’s station. A podium like an inside-out cockpit sat upon the remnant deck and reached down through it. Cables and wires ran from the trunk below the deck connecting at various points along the length of the hull.
Raus approached the exposed cockpit and wrapped his hands around handlebars issuing from a yoke. Seconds after contact, a warbling sound, weak and infirm, signaled a general shuddering that racked the entire craft.
“Uh. . .” Jav’s voice, filled with uncertainty, came from outside.
“Give it a minute, Jav,” Raus said. He studied the controls, and though he didn’t completely understand them, the principles and design
were not so different from those of his father’s machines. He flipped a thumb switch on the right handlebar and rotated the grip, which clicked three times, locking gently into position each time. A shattered gauge before him lit up, flicking up to and back from what looked like full capacity. He pulled up on the yoke, raising it vertically, and heard Jav scramble backwards in surprise when the craft rose in response to the yoke.
“Hey, this can be your Gran,” Jav said with excitement that reeked of sarcasm.
Raus turned to see Jav peeking over the side of the windram.
“Do you think it’ll get us to the settlement?” Jav asked, not allowing for a response to his gibe.
“It might just.”
“What’s this run on anyway? Any fuel it might have had—” Jav stopped, looked around, realized there were no tanks for fuel, no engine to speak of, and finished his statement weakly, “—would have dried up by now.”
Raus smiled. “At the moment, me. It runs on bioelectric power, just as the Lightning Gun does. The transistors appear to be in remarkably good shape, but are nowhere near as efficient as our family designs.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“It means that with Kapler designs you get more output from the same amount of input. When you fired the Lightning Gun back at the Tower, you powered it with the touch of your finger.”
Jav cocked his skull head in surprise, blank sockets staring.
“So you begin to see why our Sarsan technology may be of some interest to the Empire.”
“I do,” Jav had to admit. “Tell me, though, if you’re the fuel, what’s the engine?”
“The hull. You see those leads running out from here? They power sections of the hull, each of which produces a field strong enough to distort gravity. They’re arranged so that forward—or backward or sideways—motion can be achieved by a controlled falling.”
“Mm-hmm. I see,” Jav said unconvincingly. “So how is it that you know so much about these windrams?”
“When I was a kid, my father and I hauled a wreck back to Kapler Tower. We took it apart. He had me study it, explain its working principles, and put it back together. It worked, too, but not for very long. My father packed it full of explosives and used it as a slow-moving sneak bomb against one of the last incursions the Witch Kings sent against us. He thought it was very funny, as I recall, but I was disappointed. I was proud of having reassembled it and made it work.” Raus shook his head. “It was a shame.” Raus returned to the present with a sigh. “With a few minor repairs, we may be able to make good use of this boat, if only as a mobile gun.”
“Gun?” Jav said.
Raus nodded. “The prow spar is a Lightning Gun.”
“We’ve got ten days to succeed, and by the looks of things, your terrible Witch Kings have fallen on hard times, so we may be overdoing it a bit. It’s up to you.”
“So if it were you, you’re saying you wouldn’t bother?”
Jav shrugged. “This is your planet, your technology, your traditional enemy. You’re better equipped to make that determination than I am. For me, everything is basically an unknown. I’d prefer going into a situation like that with what I know I can count on: me. But you’re in charge, and I certainly wouldn’t begrudge you a little irony or artistic flair.”
Raus grinned. “Good.”
“Yeah, I’m just not sure how I feel about spending idle time here with your new friends.”
“What do you mean? They’re as well-behaved as yours are,” Raus said, actually sounding a bit hurt.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s a hygiene thing. I guess we’re lucky it’s so cold or they would smell as bad as they look.”
“I’ll work better with silence, thank you,” Raus said, turning away to remove the dashboard panel.
“Okay, okay,” Jav said, reflexively raising his hands in a placating gesture. “That was unfair, I guess. You mind if I use a few for practice?”
Raus waved his hand dismissively, not bothering to turn around. “If you get bitten, don’t complain to me.”
“Yes, sir,” Jav said, defeated.
• • •
Over the next thirty minutes, Jav practiced the Eighteen Heavenly Claws, going through all of the nine set routines. When finished with them, he moved through the crowd of corpse soldiers, taking care not to touch them. He couldn’t help the revulsion he felt, and knew that he was maintaining a double standard with his own skeletons, but there was something about them, about their flesh that suggested disease and corruption and contagion in a way that even Lor Kalkin with his Contamination Pump did not. At first, he’d fully intended to expend a few of Raus’s troops, but ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to lay his hands upon them. Something about them was repulsive. Of course they were hard to look at, some with preserved but half-rotted entrails spilling from their bellies, some with eyes hanging down to their cheeks by desiccated nerve stalks, some with missing arms or chunks from their torsos, but beyond simple disgust, something about them made Jav uncomfortable. Something about them seemed familiar somehow, and not because they were cousins to his animate skeletons. There was an emptiness about them that reminded him of danger, of being vulnerable, and ultimately, of loss. He knew that he was overreacting and was frustrated by his inability to ascertain why. Plus, now that he was left to his own thoughts, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something critical he was forgetting. No matter how he approached the thought in head, though, he couldn’t figure out what it was.
He tried to focus on his practice. The exercise became one of grace, precision, and control: move through the throng without the slightest touch; come as close to striking as possible without actual contact. He already knew that he could pulp the lot of them, so this was the more fruitful pursuit.
True, the corpses didn’t fight back or try to evade him or even try to move, but they were standing close enough together to make avoiding them altogether quite challenging. The frustration building slowly within him over his inability to remember whatever it was that niggled him and what exactly the corpses reminded him of didn’t make it any easier, either.
• • •
Nearly finished, Raus stood up from his repairs for a short break and watched Jav move through the dead men like liquid. He had been impressed with Jav when they’d fought, and was again now. Speed and finesse were all well and good, but he knew that Jav was also freakishly strong for his size. Perhaps all Shades of the Viscain Empire were, but Raus doubted, even acknowledging his newcomer’s perspective, that any of them combined those three traits quite so effectively as Jav did.
“Can your skeletons fight as well as you?”
“Nope,” Jav said, at the end of a back-handed claw that would have left its target face a crater and a ruin.
“They were armed with heavy spears or long-handled swords or something, weren’t they?”
“Pole swords. A style taught by Salavar Grummel.” Jav leapt up out of the throng, sank back into it several meters away. “That’s not to say that the Eighteen Heavenly Claws is better than Secret Track Pole Sword, or that I’m better than Grummel, but while my troops could have been made to copy my style, they could never copy my F-Gene. It made more sense to give them a simple weapon that increased their range in melee.”
Raus nodded. Jav had explained the F-Gene to him before.
“You know, since your troops spread your power through infection, clinching is an ideal strategy.” Jav twisted his claw hands in a way that would have disemboweled the corpse before him, turned and advanced on another. “When we get back, let’s talk to Gilf Scanlan and see about teaching your corpses some Sarsan Wrestling.”
“Is that possible?” Raus’s interest was piqued, his tone that of a child hearing something too good to be true.
“If you need convincing,” Jav said, stepping from the forest of corpses, “maybe you’d like Rommel to teach you some Secret Track Pole Sword.”
Raus grinned. “Maybe I would.”
“Just about. You?”
“Just about.”
“I notice that all my troops are still intact.”
“Yeah,” Jav said, shrugging, “no bite marks here, either, so I guess we’re even.”
INTERLUDE
All pastel softness and lush with life, the sun-bright meadows gave sanctuary to all. Flowers of all colors and description grew according to the will of the observer, birds sang the songs one wanted to hear, fruit of any kind could be had, along with any other delicacy one wished, but it was more diversion than sustenance. Below a tree in dappled shade, statuesque ladies, perfect in form, proportion, and beauty, covered only in diaphanous white shifts and with fragrant garlands upon their heads, danced upon the grass, grasping at butterflies, singing along with the birds. Couples and small groups were everywhere upon the meadows, but the meadows went on forever, or seemed to. There was room for all, and there would be for generations to come.
Here, while the rest danced, ate, and indulged in earned indolence, the Bright Ones kept watch, maintaining the balance between life and death, protecting the sun-bright meadows from anything that might cause harm. This was how it had always been and how it always would be.
Being tuned to both life and death, though, the Bright Ones were sensitive to change, while the rest of the meadows’ denizens were not, so it came as no surprise when the word came.
Lounging in the grass, a giant of a man covered only partially in that same diaphanous white, turned to the presence behind him even before being addressed. “What is it, Emis?”
“Two people have been seen as close as the southern range, Thars,” Emis Jesler said. He wasn’t built quite so well as Thars and was accompanied by a woman, taller than he and possessed of a subdued, understated beauty. Both were dressed as all were in the sun-bright meadows.
Thars Kohanic was silent for a moment. “None but Kapler or one of his line could make it that far.”
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 11