Elemental

by Steven Savile

  Getting out of the Compound was proving both less and more difficult than he’d expected.

  When he’d woken to find himself laid out on the bed in the small cabin, he had at first no idea where he was. He realized he’d been there some time only when he tried to stand up. The weakness and confusion in his limbs made it clear that it must have been at least six months since he’d last been awake. The alarm this caused was soothed by the room he found himself in, which was cosy, its walls lined with dark pine. It reminded him of something, though he couldn’t remember what.

  For a week or so he’d been content to sit cross-legged on the bed, helping himself to the food which appeared in the fridge (cold cuts and mild cheese), his mind a content and comfortable blank. Then one day he tried the door to the cabin, and found it was unlocked. It opened onto a small balcony, and when he stepped out into the cold, Dark realized immediately where he was.

  The balcony was about a hundred meters above ground level, and on a low mountain, and thus had a very good view. Good in the sense that you could see a great deal, at least. What you could see a great deal of, unfortunately, was snow. Snow and fir trees as far as the eye could see. Dotted over the landscape at irregular intervals, sometimes swaddled in a patch of deep emerald trees, sometimes stark against the ice, were other tall windowless buildings. The sky was black as night, but the scene was lit as if by a dim and hidden winter sun.

  It could only be one place. The Compound.

  Suddenly galvanized, Dark turned on his heel and walked back into his room. The Compound.

  Bastards.

  There had to be a way out, and as soon as he found it, he was gone. He made a perfunctory search of the cupboards and wall units first, looking for warm clothing. He didn’t expect to find anything. He didn’t. The room was plenty warm, and so far as They were concerned he was supposed to stay put. He took a look inside the fridge too, thinking it would be a good idea to take provisions, but for the first time it was empty. He suspected that was not a good sign, and immediately began looking for the door.

  It was surprisingly easy to find, right where you would expect it to be. There was no handle, but he was able to get enough purchase on the edge of one of the panels to establish it wasn’t locked. Five minutes’ jiggling with the end of his knife worked the catch free, and the door popped open. Dark shook his head. Hardly maximum security.

  Outside was a corridor, thickly carpeted in an orange kind of way. Unobtrusively banal music trickled down from small speakers in the ceiling. Dark closed his door carefully behind him and set off.

  The walls of the corridor were studded with doors, each identical. He realized what his room had reminded him of. It was like a small suite in a dismal resort somewhere cold, a down-market ski village out of season. He considered opening one of the doors to see what was on the other side, but decided against it. It would probably only be someone lying on their bed or blankly munching salami. Also, it might set off an alarm, and in either event it was not germane to his purpose, which was getting out before anyone realized he was on the move. The last thing he needed was a passenger, especially one who hadn’t the gumption to make their own way out of their room.

  About fifty yards down the corridor he found a door that was rather larger than the others. It was split vertically across the middle, but didn’t appear to have any handles. First casting a glance both ways down the corridor, Dark kicked it. Nothing happened. He tried slipping his knife between the two halves, but there was no give there either. Then he noticed that there was a panel on the wall by the door. He pushed it experimentally and there was a pinging noise, followed by a sound from behind the door. The sound got louder, stopped, and then the two halves of the door divided. Beyond them was a small room.

  Dark stepped in to have a look. As soon as both of his feet were in the room the doors shut behind him and the room started to fall. Dark was deeply suspicious of this development, but it seemed to be dropping in a controlled way, and there didn’t appear to be anything he could do about it. The room was paneled in the same wood as the suites, and full of quiet music that went “Da dada da, da da dada da,” but was in every other way featureless.

  After about a minute the room stopped falling, and the doors opened. Dark cautiously poked his head out, and saw what seemed to be a large foyer of some kind. Had it not been completely deserted it would have looked like the lobby of a hotel. He stepped out into it. There was a ping behind him and he whirled, knife at the ready, to see the doors of the room shut again.

  An elevator. That’s what it was, an elevator.

  Shaking his head, disturbed at having forgotten something so simple, Dark put his knife back and walked quickly away toward the large doors at the far end of the foyer. They were about fifty feet high and made entirely of glass, glass which looked six inches thick. Dark peered out into the late winter afternoon for a moment, and then turned back to consider his position.

  He didn’t know much about the Compound. Nobody did. In all honesty, Dark hadn’t really believed it existed. He’d first heard about it from his mother, who’d told him it was where careless people went. His mother had been off her head, though, and he’d felt safe in disregarding pretty much everything she said. Then a long time later, but still a long time ago, he’d heard people mention it when he was in the Corps. Some of the Gillsans, worn out and stretched thin in the middle of a long campaign, had seemed to feel the Compound calling them. They didn’t know where it was, or what, but somehow they heard its voice. They appeared to both fear it and desire it, like some heroic kamikaze mission, a type of suffering that was an end to other kinds. Some had disappeared as the campaign went on: perhaps they’d been brought here, were sitting behind the doors in some of the buildings. Someone else might have thought of launching a single-handed rescue mission, but Dark had left the Corps a long time ago. Other-directed heroics had never been his thing.

  He turned back indecisively to the doors and gave one of them a push. Though heavy, it moved easily enough, allowing a stream of extremely cold air to curl into the lobby. He let it swing shut again.

  He was going to have to go out there. That much was clear. Wherever an escape route lay, it was unlikely to be within the building. The problem was that he didn’t really want to leave. It was going to be very cold, and he had no idea where to go once he got out. Even if he could find the edges of the Compound (assuming edges existed, and it wasn’t infinite in its own terms), he had no conception of where it existed in relation to any world he knew.

  He shook his head again. Such indecision was unlike him. He hadn’t got to his position by being unable to stir himself when the need arose. True, his position was that of leader of the Spartan Bold, an increasingly marginalized group of mercenaries; and yes, they might all be dead by now, but the point still held. Perhaps the Compound wasn’t a universal realm, as everyone assumed, applying equally to those from all sides. Perhaps it was under the control of the Goudy, and Gillsans fighters were brought here to take them out of the action. Maybe there was something in the air here that made you unsure, unwilling to go back and fight. If there was, it wasn’t going to defeat him.

  First pulling what there were of his robes around him, Dark shoved the door open and stepped out into the cold.

  At four Daniel woke suddenly from a light doze. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and then to realize what had woken him. His mother’s breathing was deeper, more labored, and the change in rhythm had alerted some still wakeful part of his brain. He sat forward quickly and looked at her face. It seemed relatively clear. Last time this had happened he’d phoned the doctor, sure that his mother was going to die. The doctor had told him not to worry, that the change in breathing didn’t mean anything. Just before he’d put the phone down, Daniel had heard the sound of a woman’s distant laugh at the other end, and wondered whether he’d caught the doctor at a time when patient care was not his foremost concern.

  But the doctor had been right. His mother
’s breathing had returned to normal; and the same, he saw, was happening now.

  Daniel made a tour of the bed, checking that the duvet wasn’t rucked up anywhere or letting cold air in. It wasn’t likely to be, as she hardly ever moved, but he checked it anyway, eyes running sightlessly over the pattern of faint interlocking rectangles. He’d spent too long looking at it to notice it anymore.

  Sighing heavily, he picked up her glass and took it into the kitchen, walking quickly past the door to the cellar, which still made him nervous. He changed the water in the glass and put some ice in it, and then set about making a cup of tea for himself. A year ago he’d never drunk any tea, viewing it as a grownup medicine. Now he drank it all the time. There were lots of tea bags, and his mother never seemed to want it anymore. He thought about looking in the fridge, but he knew what was in there because he’d put it there himself, and he wasn’t hungry.

  As he waited for the kettle to boil, he looked through one of the leaflets on the kitchen table. It was one of the ones his mother had designed, when she’d still been able to work. He could remember her being proud of it, explaining how she’d done it, why she’d chosen those particular typefaces. To him they’d just looked like words and letters.

  They didn’t anymore.

  About three hours later, Dark was huddled up against the base of a tree in one of the clumps of firs. He had no way of telling how much time had elapsed since he’d left the building. The sky was still the same leaden late-afternoon gray, and he’d seen no one. He was telling himself that time had passed because he needed to feel that it had, and three hours seemed about right. He’d given up telling himself that the cold was within him, and had spent the last few minutes in amongst the trees to see if it was any warmer in there. It wasn’t.

  He realized now that getting out of the building had been too easy. It had been made easy because it achieved nothing at all. At first he’d followed a sort of path through the snow, hoping to find who’d made it. After a few hundred yards it ran out, and since then every pace had been a couple of feet deep. Occasional gusts of wind sent flurries into his already freezing face, and he’d tripped over a hidden branch once and gone sprawling. Twice he’d thought he’d seen more tracks in the snow, but as they appeared to start from nowhere and to just peter out after twenty yards, they couldn’t have been real. Apart from those highlights, nothing had happened at all. Nothing except the tramping sound of his boots in freezing snow, and the constant curtain of yet more fucking snow falling against the velvet sky. His legs ached, but aside from that Dark had lost most of the feeling in his body.

  What’s more, there was something wrong. When he’d looked over the surrounding area from his balcony he’d been able to see several other buildings. They should have been in easy walking distance. They weren’t. They had disappeared. He’d slogged across fields and clambered up and down huge steplike levels, but there were no buildings. At all. And no people, and no animals. Just clumps of unhelpful trees. He’d changed direction several times, hoping to find a more profitable tack, and now had very little idea of where he was in relation to his starting point.

  It was all going very badly.

  After flapping his hands against his sides vigorously to get the ice off, Dark put his head down and tramped away from the trees and up the hill in front of him. He hadn’t liked being amongst the trees. The whole of the Compound had a forlorn atmosphere, but it had been worse in there, darker and older. He made a grimace with his face to see if he could move it. He could, but it was hard work. If he didn’t find some shelter soon, he was in trouble.

  The thought of death, he found, was still unappealing. So the Compound itself clearly wasn’t death, unless his mind was just taking a long time to catch up with events. Maybe his mother had been right. Maybe this was where careless people went. The problem was working out what the hell that might mean. Maybe it was some kind of Symbolism: the Goudy had always been very keen on such weapons, had started to use them in earnest during the last few offensives. The Gillsans had never really understood Symbolism, and there had been great losses. That was why they had been prepared to use the services of outfits like the Spartan Bold, who were immune.

  As he got farther up the hill he realized that it seemed to stop at the top, as if the drop was much steeper on the other side. This was confirmed when he reached the summit. In front of him the hill shaded away quickly, into several hundred feet of stepped fields. At the bottom was a valley, which was largely filled with trees. Squinting against the snow, however, Dark thought he could make out something else. Nestling into the edge of one of the clumps was a building. Hardly noticing he was cackling to himself, Dark rubbed his hands over his lips to thaw them and then set off carefully down the slope.

  Carefully wasn’t careful enough, and in the end he covered a third of the downward distance in one ungraceful slide, tumbling over and over through the snow. He fetched up in a painful heap at the base of a tree, but nothing was broken and as a means of descent it had been a lot quicker than walking. He picked himself up and hurried toward the bottom of the slope, not bothering to brush the snow off.

  As he approached the building, it became clearer that it exactly resembled the one he had left, now at least four hours ago. It could have been one of the ones he’d seen from the balcony, were it not for the fact that it had taken far too long to get to, and had involved walking several miles. It was about thirty stories high and built of the same dark brown, almost black, stone. A dim glow showed behind the glass doors. Dark fell against them, expecting at the last moment for them to be locked, but they parted and he stumbled into the lobby.

  It too was exactly the same as the one he’d left, deserted but warm. As the water began to drip out of his clothes and hair, Dark paced round the foyer, luxuriating in the warmth and considering what to do next. Striking out for the edges of the Compound was clearly not a viable course of action. Things didn’t work properly out there, and it was just too fucking cold.

  When he was perspiring lightly Dark stopped pacing, shook himself like a dog to get rid of the bulk of the excess water, and took stock. He felt much more together now, more alive. Nearly freezing to death had done that much for him, at least. It had also made him irritable. He was fed up with being in a cold no-man’s-land. He wanted to get back to the fight. But how?

  It was impossible to tell whether this was actually the building he had left before going out into the cold. It shouldn’t have been by any logical means, but it might be. It was so identical that it could be either the same one, or a different one that was exactly the same. Dark decided that his first step should be finding out which was the case. If this was the building he’d left, which was clearly impossible, then there was definitely Symbolism at work; and in that case the Compound was almost certainly Goudy territory. If so, then he’d know what to do. Liberate any imprisoned Gillsans sleepers he could find and try to discover the way out, killing any attendants who showed up.

  If it wasn’t, he still had to find a way out, but he’d be doing it by himself. Loosening his robes he strode toward the elevator.

  The elevator looked the same, and the music was the same, but that didn’t really prove anything. Elevators were always the same. As the doors shut behind him, Dark realized he didn’t know what floor his suite had been on. Looking round the room he saw it wouldn’t have made any difference. There were no buttons to press. It would either take him there, or it wouldn’t.

  It didn’t. The elevator flowed smoothly upward, and after about three minutes Dark was forced to concede that it wasn’t going to stop anywhere near the floor he’d found himself on earlier. After about twenty minutes he began to wonder if it was going to stop at all, and after an hour he lay down on the floor and went to sleep.

  When he woke the elevator was still climbing at the same steady rate. Dark dedicated a desultory couple of minutes to checking once more that there really was no way of influencing the elevator’s progress, but soon gave up. He used up so
me time looking at the carpet, trying to work out where the bland, almost indiscernible pattern might have come from. Its regular overlapping rectangles looked a little like Goudy workmanship, but not enough to make anything of.

  Just when Dark was becoming convinced that the elevator was destined to climb calmly forever, the sound of ascent dropped rapidly in pitch and the room juddered to a halt. The doors took a moment to open and Dark readied himself in front of them. His bet was that they would open on the foyer, proving that there was Symbolism afoot. If so, he’d just have to find some other way upstairs. He took his knife out and held it lightly behind him, just in case.

  When the doors did open, however, it wasn’t onto the lobby. It wasn’t clear what it was, in fact. All Dark could see was a faint dark green tinge, accompanied by distant dripping sounds. He stepped carefully up to the door.

  It took him a second or two to make sense of what he was seeing. The elevator opened out of a wall, a wall of mossy concrete that seemed to stretched indefinitely in all directions. The only light was a faint glow, probably some kind of phosphorescence. Just below the elevator door was a narrow staircase made of wrought iron. About two feet wide with a low handrail, it climbed at an angle of forty-five degrees up the wall into the darkness. About thirty yards away, directly in front, was a similar wall. That was all he could see, though as he listened carefully he could hear occasional dripping sounds, and, very far below, the suggestion of a larger body of water.

  Sighing irritably, Dark stepped onto the staircase. The elevator pinged and the doors shut behind him, removing some of the light. It was much warmer here than it had been in the building, and he loosened his robes before setting off up the steps.