Rictus paused, too, looking at Sal’s breath. “Is it getting cold? You should have said something, Cal. I’m less sensitive to this kind of stuff—” He pointed down at his legs. “No monkey.”
Cal studiously ignored the comment.
Rictus looked over at Enoch, who was rubbing his bare arms. “You want to head back and grab something less ‘summer shepherd’s garb’ to wear? I’d offer you my jacket, but this old leather is only kept in one piece by my LifeBeat—part of the upgraded package.”
Enoch shook his head.
“We’ve already come pretty far—I’ll be alright.”
Rictus looked at Cal, who pursed his lips. The ape scratched at its leg and seemed to be unaffected by the cold. Enoch wondered if it had been bred to be hardier than its tropical ancestors—he was certainly jealous of the creature’s shaggy pelt.
The tunnels beneath Babel were extensive. According to Cal, this network of metal passageways and machinery had been around since before the Schism, and was one of the few “relatively untouched” remnants of that forgotten time on this side of the world. The walls and ceiling were paneled with sheets of thin, pale metal. From time to time, they came across empty rooms—rooms with jagged holes in the floors and ceiling.
“Signs of ancient violence,” said Rictus.
“Looting by a disreputable tavern owner,” said Cal.
Occasionally, they passed dark hallways extending endlessly from one side to the other, but Cal kept them moving in a straight line. He said that this passage would take them to the “fully-functioning secret” he had discovered in his last trip down here, and that the same passage would continue to carry them straight through the bowels of the city and out into the northern swamps.
“We should be almost out from under Babel by now, right?” asked Enoch.
Rictus tipped his head back and laughed. “We haven’t even gotten under the tower yet, kid. Babel is a big city. Cal, are you sure you don’t want to head back now and try for a sunnier path?”
“You saw what I did, Ric. Those soldiers that arrived at the end of your show weren’t there for the ale. I had three separate informants tell me that they were all over the city looking for a boy and his ghoul . . . and if I hadn’t cut your second encore and rushed you back here, we’d be in the tower by now. The part without any windows.”
Rictus started to mumble something but stopped and looked back up at the arched ceiling. “Well, this doesn’t look good.”
Enoch followed the specter’s stare up into the flickering blue light—a light which he had ignited back when he first paused and noticed the remnant lines of power running behind the paneled walls.
After walking in the poor illumination of Cal’s flashlight for an hour, it had been nice to be able to see the area both in front of and behind them. The light snapping on overhead like that had brought Rictus leaping out in front of the group, his sword humming around in a protective arc. The specter shot quick looks up and down the tunnel before Enoch’s laughter broke the tension. Cal had laughed as well, commenting that traveling down here with a Pensanden may just have its advantages. Rictus had grumbled, detaching the flashlight cord from his LifeBeat generator and telling Enoch that he should warn him before surprising him like that. That maybe next time Rictus’s sword might decide to “go luddite on your head.”
Whatever that meant. He had made Enoch agree to extinguish the light behind them as they descended, and that did make sense. No trail.
Now if only we could find some wood for a fire . . .
Enoch shivered again, squinting up into the light. It just looked like a long glass tube. Like the hundreds of others they had passed as they moved through the paneled sections of this passageway.
“I don’t see anything, Rictus.”
“Don’t look into the light tubes, silly peasant boy. Look at the walls around them.”
Turning to glance at the sides, Enoch noticed dark stains on some of the highest panels.
“I’ve not seen those down here before,” mumbled Cal, “but I’ve lived long enough to recognize the arcs and spatters that blood can leave.”
The words hung in the chilly air for a long moment. Rictus had his sword out again, and Enoch followed suit.
“Have you ever seen anyone else down here, Cal?”
Cal shook his head.
“A few times, but that was years ago. People looking for shelter. For scrap to sell. It’s probably been half a century since I last ran across anybody. All of the entryways have been sealed up and bricked over—Nyraud doesn’t want anyone down here, that’s for sure. The only way I could keep my little secret door was by hiding it under a grimy, forgettable tavern and then outliving anyone who might remember its location. There are stories, though . . .”
“Here we go,” said Rictus, letting out a sigh.
“They are just stories,” said Cal, ignoring Rictus. “But you hear them enough over the years, and certain similarities begin to stand out. You know the sort, Ric—rumors of the labyrinths underneath the city being full of gold or unspoiled tek. Rumors of medicines, elixirs from the past which can return a man’s youth or heal any sickness. Silly stuff. But the constant stories? The ones where the details don’t change over the years? They are always the ones about monsters. About the trolls.”
“Trolls?” said Enoch. He’d already faced coldmen and a Silverwitch and a specter—this was getting to be too much.
“Oh, come on, Cal!” complained Rictus. “I know you—you wouldn’t be down here if you thought there was any chance of danger. You were a half-decent musician but a coward through and through. Remember that platabruja ambush back in Septimo? Your screams had that mek-witch thinking she had trapped a caravan of monkeys—no offense Sal—and I took two daggers in the gut before I could stop laughing enough to take her head off.”
Cal stared at Rictus, waiting for him to finish. “Sure, Ric, make fun of the disembodied head riding on a monkey. Very big of you. But I’m serious—I hear a lot of rumors. A lot of stories. I preside over a place where people come to share their sorrows and forget their pain. After a century or two of this, you learn to see patterns.”
This caught Enoch’s attention, and he turned to give Cal his full attention. For a moment he forgot how cold he was.
I see patterns, too.
Cal had a strange look in his eye. Distant.
“You learn to recognize things. Patterns in how stories are told. When, and by whom. The repetition of certain elements, the plot and structure of a million tales through a million tongues can form . . . clouds of truth . . . over time.”
Rictus clicked his dry tongue. “Clouds of truth? Um, are we still talking about trolls?”
“I don’t know a better way to describe it, Ric. Things are so much more complex than we’d like them to be. The right and wrong of our world seems so obvious sometimes—too obvious. It’s vulgar. The Schism, the Hunt,” he laughed, “even our heroic little quest to help ‘the last remnant of a fallen race’.” Here he nodded over at Enoch.
“Do you think Ketzelkol saw this? Saw the meta-tale? I mean, here this all-powerful machine was charged with our protection, and instead it burnt our tek and turned us into cavemen. It’s like a bad morality play. Sure, we can’t nuke ourselves anymore or choke to death on smog. But this couldn’t have been the solution! Again, it’s too stupid and too simple—the true tales don’t work like that.”
Enoch and Rictus were silent. Cal had gone somewhere else in his mind, and they didn’t know how to respond.
“Maybe this was why the Winged One split with her sibling? For a tale to hope for resolution, there has to be a . . .” Cal noticed the others staring at him.
“Sorry.” He looked down. His voice broke. “I . . . I guess I don’t get much of a chance to talk with somebody who can see beyond the immediate concerns of day-to-day peasant life. Or somebody who remembers the time before. Who remembers what we used to be—what I used to be . . .” Cal was crying now, and Sal rea
ched up to place a hairy paw on his master’s cheek. Rictus took a step forward.
“No, no. I’m alright. It’s been a long time, Ric.” Cal trembled. “So very long.”
Rictus ignored his friend’s protests and sat, putting his long arms around the ape and Cal in one smooth gesture. Enoch looked away. He recognized the pain in this moment, but his mind was racing.
I need to know more about these patterns Cal talked about. There is truth in what he said; I can feel it. I need to understand this “meta-tale.”
After a long moment, Cal cleared his throat, and Sal gently removed Rictus’s arms from around them. Rictus understood, and he gave his friend a bony smile. Cal whistled, and the ape leapt up to hang from a thick cable dangling from the ceiling.
“Okay, so about the trolls: I know, Ric, that stories with trolls in them are usually based on something mundane that scared the teller. They are usually, and obviously, fabricated accounts. You and I would both recognize a description of the real thing—” That caught Enoch’s attention.
The real thing?
“—so, what caught my attention is that the latest rumors are sharply different from the imagined ones I’d been listening to for years. More . . . accurate. But also disturbingly wrong. They have the trolls foraying above ground, actually emerging from the old doors—doors which have been shut for decades—and dragging people back down underneath. Nobody important or noteworthy, just street children or alleyway drunks. This is why the stories haven’t caught the attention of Nyraud’s city guard. But I’ve heard enough of these tales from enough people to think that something is going on. Something.” Here he smiled up at Rictus. “Clouds of truth are notoriously unspecific. But I think we have trolls under Babel.”
The change of topic, specifically to bloodthirsty monsters, hit Enoch like a winter gale. His teeth chattered.
Oh yeah—I’m freezing!
“Rictus, Cal—I think I may actually be ready to head back and get some warmer clothes, especially if what you say is true about how far we . . . Hey!” Enoch flinched as Mesha sank her claws into his shoulder, hissing at the passageway behind them. He turned.
There was a shadow at the end of the hall. It was almost undetectable, a thicker darkness amidst the shadows where the blue light faded into blackness.
With a flash, Rictus was in front of Enoch, long sword humming to life. “Move back, you two—we don’t know who this is.”
As if in response to Rictus’s words, another shadow moved up next to the first. Followed by another.
Rictus turned his head slightly towards Enoch, keeping one eye on the shadows. “They’re deliberately staying out of the light. Can you turn on the light in the passageway behind us, Enoch?”
Enoch nodded and then put his hand to his forehead. Mesha leapt to the ground and stalked towards Rictus’s feet, growling.
The mind is a world, the consciousness its light. As day turns to night, so shall my mind; afila lumin setting as the nubla rises, and my mindworld revolves.
The familiar lines of the power network spread out around him, and it was an easy thing to re-ignite the lights in the hallway they had just passed through. The bulbs were still warm.
The light flickered on, and Enoch gasped. Even Rictus staggered back a few steps.
The hallway was full of trolls.
The monsters were startled by the light and scrambled back into the darker passages behind them. But in those few seconds, Enoch had seen enough to terrify him to the core.
The trolls were tall, easily eight feet at the lopsided crouch they seemed to favor. Large, meaty hands reached down to the floor—hands ending in misshapen fingers stained brown with blood and filth. They had small, bony heads with cruel black-button eyes placed closely together over a hooked nose. Drool seeped from wide, craggy mouths, rolled over chinless jaws, and disappeared into the matted hair of their naked chests. These monsters looked like horrible caricatures of men, twisted and swollen into forms that rippled with bestial strength.
“I told you so.”
That was Cal. He had whistled Sal up into the rafters above Rictus.
“So why didn’t you warn us about this before we got here?” growled the specter, his eyes riveted on the heavy shapes moving in the darkness behind them.
“Well, I’ve never actually seen any. And these stories are new. Really new. Only a few weeks old, actually, so I wasn’t positive—well, at least until we saw the blood. There was a chance we wouldn’t see anything; we’ve been in troll country before, Ric. Remember? They never attack an armed group, and certainly never in the light.”
One of the trolls edged out into the light, squinting its tiny eyes in the blue glow. Standing erect to a full twelve-foot height, it sniffed at the brightness above him. The creature was massive, and Enoch could see the bones of its knuckles protruding from pink skin like dull yellow horns. With a low snarl, the troll swung at the bulb and shattered it. The end of the passageway went black. Cal and Rictus looked at each other.
“That’s odd.”
Rictus, with his sword extended in one hand, reached behind him with the other and pushed Enoch backwards, slowly following. The trolls crept after them, hesitantly following the big one in the lead.
“Move. Slowly. Enoch, keep the lights on in front of us as we move. The light doesn’t hurt them, but they don’t like it.”
“Okay—let me try to increase the power.”
With a push, the lights above them glowed brighter. The big troll shuffled back a couple of steps, deep growls coming from behind him. The beasts didn’t like having to wait.
Rictus kept his little group at an even pace, slowly moving through the tunnel. Enoch turned on the lights ahead of them as they moved, and the lead troll smashed the glass tubes one by one as he followed. It was getting impatient, coming closer and closer after each light went out. The trolls behind it were even more impatient, pushing and jostling. At one point the lead troll turned on the creature at its back with a snarl. The snarl was answered with a roar, and the walls shook as the two monsters grappled. In the half-light, Enoch could see this new troll cuff the leader to the ground and leap on its stunned form. He looked away as the usurper took a massive bite out of its fallen packmate and was quickly surrounded by more trolls eager for the easy meal. Horrible sounds, wet and hungry, filled the dark tunnel behind them. Rictus pushed Enoch and Cal onwards.
Distracted, the trolls stopped following them. A quiet minute passed. Two. Cal whispered if maybe the beasts had gone looking for different prey—or had perhaps already sated themselves.
Rictus shook his head. “They’ll be back. Did you see how they jumped on that one in front the moment he fell? Something’s wrong with these trolls. They’re starving.”
“Poor bastards,” said Cal.
Enoch gave an empty laugh, impressed that Cal could joke at a time like this. Then he looked over and noticed that Cal wasn’t kidding. He honestly felt pity for these things!
“Are you serious?” asked Enoch through chattering teeth.
Cal looked up at him and nodded.
“They were men once, Enoch. A remnant of the ‘souls who oiled the gears’ of our golden age, as Rictus puts it.”
Enoch decided he was done letting these mysterious innuendos fly by. And besides, talking made him forget about the cold. And the trolls.
“What do you mean? Are the trolls as old as you specters?”
Rictus laughed, and Cal looked slightly offended. Sal stopped to scratch himself before continuing down the hallway.
“I’ll just assume you meant that out of innocent curiosity, Enoch. An artist never tells his age, you see.”
Rictus was still laughing. Cal continued.
“As for how old the trolls are, I suppose it’s possible that some of them have survived from our time—apoptosis, negated cell death and all that—” He caught Enoch’s blank expression.
“Sorry, old timey words which mean that trolls don’t die unless you make them die. So
, sure, these could be remnants from our age. But not necessarily—they’ve certainly been prolific since then. You’d have to ask the troll, I suppose.”
He looked from Enoch to Rictus expectantly. Nobody was laughing. Cal frowned.
“It’s complicated, Enoch. These trolls, like so many other elements of this wonderful dark age, are leftovers from the world before the Schism. Uh, how would you tell this, Ric?”
“Start with the plague.”
“The plague? You want me to get into . . . ?”
Enoch noticed that Rictus had gone serious, still walking slowly along the passageway, but with a strange look in his eyes.
Is he angry? At what?
“Alright, the plague then. Okay, Enoch, even though our world had become automated to the hilt, there were some tasks that we assumed would always require the human touch. One of these was medical care. Doctors and nurses and all that.” He paused and looked over at Rictus.
“Do they even have those anymore?”
Rictus shook his head. “No, that kind of stuff ended with the Schism. You know that, Cal. I’ve met some tinkers who can leech you for a few coppers, though.”
Cal grimaced. He turned back to Enoch, who had just turned on the next row of lights above them. Still no sign of trolls.
Maybe they lost us?
Cal continued.
“So, when the Crow Plague struck the Asian Conglomerate—”
“And it didn’t just kill birds,” interrupted Rictus.
“—it ripped through the hospitals like wildfire, infecting the patients and the doctors. Undetected for months, it traveled through organ transplants. When its second stage took hold, just about every hospital in that hemisphere took a hit. The patients, already weak from other ailments, quickly succumbed to the virus. The symptoms for the disease were quickly cataloged, and, the medical community thought, understood. The doctors, assuming themselves free from infection due to all the usual precautions, kept their surviving patients isolated but continued their usual routine of travel and sociality. It wasn’t until the virus manifested itself in a third . . . horrible . . . stage that the ruling Pensanden, the Tzolkin Core, realized their dilemma. The plague had been spread throughout the world, rooted deeply in the one group of men and women who had a chance to cure it.”
Etherwalker Page 14