by Andy Graham
They walked, the lantern knocking repetitively at Brooke’s thigh as their footsteps echoed back at them off the damp rock. The candle died and sent up a curling stream of smoke just as the thin red tendrils that ran though the Donian Mountains appeared. One by one, the isolated strands soon became patches like thread veins. Deeper, where the tunnels were more humid, the streaks pulsed and flashed in soaring arterial patterns of crimson and gold. They’d been doing that when the Monster-under-the-Mountain, the thing that had once been Professor Shaw, had torn Brooke’s old patrol of 10th legionnaires apart like a child kicking spores off a lion-tooth flower in bloom. It seemed impossible to her that any of her colleagues had survived, and yet Kaleyne maintained that was the case.
They walked. The women’s shadows danced on the wet rock. In those patterns Brooke saw the Monster-under-the-Mountain before the gwenium had mutated him. Eddie Shaw had once been her mentor and saviour but then he had tried to kill her. As she watched, her shadow of bronze and blood fell, legs pinned awkwardly underneath its body. Kaleyne’s silhouette twisted into that of Captain Aalok. His feet dangled above the ground. Aalok’s hands tore at the shadow hands crushing his throat. Then the shape became Ray. It could only be him with that muscular posture, which was both proud and broken at the same time. Brooke’s hand fluttered to her belly, their belly, and as Kaleyne laid a gentle hand on Brooke’s shoulder, the shadows became just those of a grandmother and her daughter in a tunnel.
“Are you sure?” Brooke asked. “About the others? I know Ray’s alive somewhere, but Orr, Nascimento, Aalok and James?” The last name tasted bitter, though Brooke wasn’t sure who she was more angry with: Sci-Captain James for taking bribes to bring back samples of the gwenium or Baris Orr for hacking out a heart-sized lump of it from the wall when the patrol was almost out of the cavern and safe.
“Am I sure about your companions? Unfortunately, yes.” Brooke’s grandmother sidestepped a giant dragon tooth of a stalactite. “Orr and Nascimento are alive. I believe they are now working for the 13th Legion.”
“The Unsung are vile.”
“And Captain Aalok died saving Ray. If all people from Ailan were as honourable as Reza Aalok, maybe the Donian people wouldn’t have suffered at their hands for so long.”
Brooke hurried after Kaleyne as the tunnel veered left. Scarlet light from the rock seams cut demonic shadows across the Elder’s face, turning her cheekbones into knives and the steel pins in her hair into horns. As she walked, Brooke’s hand stopped its incessant stroking of her belly and rose to her face, unbidden. Will I get a fat face in a few months? What will Ray say?
“Stupid,” she hissed. “Stupid hormones, stupid body, stupid little girl. When did you catch vanity? When did you care what a man thought?” Maybe always? came the unwanted reply as Brooke realised that there was only one shadow on the wall. Kaleyne had walked on.
The crunch of their feet on gravel followed them to the Resting Room, the underground cavern where some of the Donian people chose to be interred to wait for the End Times.
Row upon row of statues waited in a red-tinted stillness. They were bearded and tattooed, armed with rocks, rifles, spears and bows. The older ones had decorative scars carved into their stone skin. Would there soon be a new rank of waiting figures criss-crossed in patterned scars? Would Lukaz and his Hoyden choose to be buried here, too? The young troublemakers of the tribes were reviving the Old Ways, the traditions that not only poked a stick in the eye of progress but gouged it out and spat in the bleeding socket.
As if reading Brooke’s mind,
(“No, it’s not magic,” her grandmother had once replied when questioned about this talent. “Not unless society is so lost up its own selfish arse that patience, observation and common sense are now so unusual they are considered magical.”)
Kaleyne said, “I don’t think the statues will have to wait much longer until they fulfil their destiny.” She gestured to one of the figures. It was a woman, eyes closed, clutching a rock or a bun in one hand. She had an apron carved into her front, as if she had been turned to stone while baking bread. “I fear the End Times will be upon us soon, the Rise of the Seven Suns, when—”
“‘—the mountain will open and the flood will bring forth the Devil trapped under the mountain. The Lion’s Crest will be ripped asunder and blood shall flow from the hill like lava.’” Brooke snorted. She could imagine Baris Orr’s scowl and Jamerson Nascimento’s taunts on hearing such a portentous pronouncement. “It’s a myth, Kaleyne.”
“The End Times?”
“No, the Last Battle will happen. But these people are not going to breathe again.” Brooke rapped her knuckles on the rock/bun-wielding baker’s bosom. It left scratches on the calluses gained from hours of wrestling. Weak! “The statues are not going to ‘shatter the seals of death and bring forth the vengeance of the tribes’.”
(The Jamerson Nascimento in her mind was roaring with laughter now, a belly-wrenching sound that dragged your own laughter out of hiding. Orr was still scowling, that left eye of his twitching its disapproval.)
“Maybe not. But if that is the case, we had all better hope that whoever attacks us comes in small numbers and lightly armed.” She tapped the stone baker on the chest, puffs of dust bloomed in the air, coating her like a dusting of flour. “Heart, spirit and good old-fashioned gumption are all well and good, but big bombs and lots of bullets are better. And we Donian people know how doggedly destructive your Ailan legions can be, especially you Rivermen.”
“I’m not sure I’m part of the 10th Legion anymore.” That cut deep. The restrictive life of a legionnaire had given her a freedom that was both claustrophobic and liberating. “I don’t—”
But Kaleyne was gone.
They threaded their way through the statues, trapped in a maze of figures that were themselves trapped in stone. Snapshots of people, little pieces of history, buried deep underground but not forgotten. When Kaleyne disappeared from view, Brooke would follow the sound of her feet, the vague smell of life amongst all the stone. Then the light from the intricate pattern of red lines and spirals in the rock would find Kaleyne’s steel hair clips, and Brooke would head towards the dancing fireflies of crimson and gold.
The Elder paused at a pool of oil-black water tucked behind a figure carved with a stiff-collared cloak that stretched to its boot heels. “That pool leads to the back of the Council Chamber. Another secret that has lain undiscovered in plain sight for far too long.
“The one with the thrones?” Brooke asked, her feet in a puddle of yellow light from her lantern
“There is only one Council Chamber,” Kaleyne said gently. “You have not been gone from us long enough to forget that. And you should know better than to think of the seats in the Council Chamber as thrones.” Before she could provide an answer, or embarrass herself with an excuse, her grandmother pointed to the pool. “Lukaz swam it.”
“Why?”
“To bring you back.” Kaleyne’s voice wasn’t chiding, just factual. “In the months after you were attacked by the Monster-under-the-Mountain—”
“Professor Eddie Shaw. Call him by the name he once answered to.”
Her grandmother’s eyes narrowed, briefly. “After the attack, in the months when we didn’t know if you were in a coma or a deep sleep, you would walk. One night you swam. We were taking it in turns to watch you. That night, if Lukaz hadn’t dived in for you, we would never have known this pool connects to our Council Chamber and you and I may not have been having this conversation now. He had no idea how long the tunnel was. Fortunately for him, and you, it is passable for a fit person.”
“He saved me?”
Kaleyne nodded.
Brooke didn’t need to ask why Lukaz had done that for her. Both women knew the answer. “Why are we here, Kaleyne? This isn’t what you wanted to show me, is it?”
“No, it isn’t, but you need the exercise and have been away from our people for too long. This walk serves both purposes.” And w
ith that, she was gone, her leather satchel bouncing on her back.
Brooke followed Kaleyne past a larger pool. This one was lit from beneath by a bubbling blue-green light. It was the one she and Ray Franklin had swum through before they had slept with each other. Kaleyne’s pace slowed, as if she were giving Brooke a chance to say something. The younger woman kept her mouth shut. Admitting to being pregnant was one thing. Admitting to her grandmother, the senior Elder of the Donian people, that the pregnancy had probably happened in one of the most sacred places her people had was another matter.
The older woman’s path wound through the statues, back into a tangle of tunnels, to a narrow hole. “And then you found this.”
A breeze tickled Brooke’s skin, cool on her sweat. The tunnel was short and opened up into a chamber that was twice the height of any man. Rocks jutted out of the walls and ceilings, shapes that in a certain light could be gargoyles or bats or demons. The threads of red twisted through this chamber, too, but unlike everywhere else under the Donian Mountains, they were intertwined with threads of its green-blue sister rock, the rock of the Northbridge on the surface, the rock by the pool where Brooke had been found. Dotted around the chamber were stone pillars. Small, tall, thin and fat, they created a labyrinth that was as random as the rows of stone people in the adjacent chamber were rigid. Engraved on the pillars were symbols in the old tongue of the Donian people.
It stole Brooke’s breath from her lungs. “The Scroll Room. I thought that was a myth?”
“Do you mean like the dead rising from our statues to fight for us?” Kaleyne asked with a wink in her voice.
“This is what you wanted to show me?”
“Almost.”
Before Brooke could ask what that meant, her grandmother trailed a finger down one pillar. “The older pillars tell tales of the Mountain Stone, King Jirving and the druid Mia Darre. Of hell’s whirlpool that drained any real magic from the lands. Of the rip in time that dragged a second moon to our planet. Of the resulting upheaval in tides and weather that destroyed millennia of civilisation. The Flood left us with fragments of technology and not much more than myths of swords in stones and peas under mattresses. These pillars warn of religions of peace used for profit, innocence not so much lost as sold. Of a hunter discovering the man he is stalking is himself. Of evil sunflowers and the Cracks in the ground that eat the marrow from your bone. The newer pillars”— she pointed left — “contain our history. The story of the Donian people.”
As she spoke, Brooke remembered herself curled up on Kaleyne’s lap, firelight flickering across her face, one side too hot, one side too cold. The thump of her grandmother’s heart beat on her back. The hypnotic drone of Kaleyne’s voice in her ears as she’d told the young Brooke her bedtime stories.
“Some of it is too ridiculous to be true,” Kaleyne said, her voice dropping out of its story-telling lilt. “Some of it is too real to not be true.”
“The sunflowers?”
Kaleyne had no answering grin for Brooke’s. “Religions of love being used for personal gain. But I also thought the Scroll Room a myth. I remember the Elders that birched me as a child—”
“The Elders punished you?” Brooke asked, shocked. “What did you do?”
“I’d rather not say.” Kaleyne pulled one of her utili-pins out of her hair and busied herself with a nail that didn’t need filing. “I remember they thought the Scroll Room was a myth. Some said it should stay that way.” She pointed with her hair clip, a blade as sharp as it was vicious, at the markings on a pillar. “Some of the people back then thought that our history should remain hidden, that the truth of who and what we were was best left as an idealised memory, rather than the cold wind of reality.” The hair clip disappeared in a smooth movement. “I’m not sure why no one found this place for so long. Maybe all the external change in the world, our struggles against a country whose interpretation of democracy depends on who is ruling whom, stopped us from looking too closely at what was right under our feet.”
Kaleyne stepped into a patch of starlight that spilled through a crack in the ceiling, a deep-blue scar dotted with silver that cut through the grey. The hiss of the wind through the grass on the mountain surface slid into the cave.
“And then a young woman in a trance stumbled across this place without even knowing what she was looking for. I’m sure there’s some kind of moral in that.” The old woman pulled a package from her leather satchel.
“What’s that?” Brooke asked.
Kaleyne opened it. The smell of meat and salted potatoes drifted over. Brooke’s mouth filled with saliva.
“Who’s it for? The Others? Another myth that’s not a lie?”
“No. This is a legend; it has some basis in the truth.”
“You’re telling me that the little people that live under the mountain, the people we leave food and drink for, actually exist?” Brooke scrubbed her hand through her hair. It hadn’t been cut for months. She’d lost the buzz cut she’d worn since she was a teenager months ago and felt overdressed and top-heavy, or at least overinsulated.
“I started the story of the Others just under thirty years ago. I had a need for it then. It’s worked well for us.”
“You made it up?”
“It was easy. A word here, throwaway comment there, a whisper in one ear, drop a few verbal seeds in another. Once you let a story free in the world, it’s impossible to bottle it back up, especially when there are ears and hearts who want to believe what it’s telling them.”
Kaleyne stepped out of the starlight, leaving a shimmering trail of dust motes behind her. Behind a cluster of pillars, a pallet lay on the floor. A gas lantern — blue, squat and rusted — sat to one side, its wick trimmed. There was a table made of rough wooden boxes with broken rust-coloured letters stamped on one side. On the table was a sheaf of papers and a pen.
“Paper?” Brooke asked, eyes wide. “The Others can write? I thought they just stole our food? Now you tell me the little people can write?”
“Not so much people, but person,” said Kaleyne, placing the food from her satchel on the table. “He’s not so little either. He volunteered to move into this cave once we found it.” She gestured to the hole in the ceiling. There’s more light and air than deeper underground. And the presence of the red and green rocks seems a safer combination than red alone, as far as we can tell.” The filigree patterns flushed a deep and more vibrant hue, as if embarrassed. “Someone needs to catalogue, record and piece together our newly discovered history. If we do that, we may be able to remember the future our past dreamed of before our present consumes us.”
“A historian? Who in the tribe would do this?”
“Not a historian.” Kaleyne’s gaze was fixed on a point over Brooke’s shoulder. “They’re all closet novelists, not as bad as journalists, but not far off. He’s not one of us, either. At least not by birth.”
“Who?” Brooke’s throat was tight.
“Someone impartial, dedicated, thorough and reliable. Someone who will spot patterns and will check those patterns to find out what they mean. Someone who governments will only trust when it suits them and, therefore, deserves our trust. A man whose life involves speaking fact to power.”
“Who?”
“A scientist,” said a man’s voice from behind Brooke. A voice that had supported and protected her. A voice that had encouraged and taught her. A voice that had disappeared from her life shortly before she’d left Sci-Corps.
Brooke spun round, angry with herself for having let someone creep up on her. Her annoyance disappeared in a wave of shock and happiness that left her weak at the knees.
“You? I thought you were—”
7
Remember A Lover
(That Place That Cats Go)
“Dead,” Chester whispered. “The VP must be lying. Bethina Laudanum can’t be dead.” Jann was, she reminded herself. Chester’s PA had been murdered in this room. And with a hesitant step, Chester forced herself a
cross the threshold of her old quarters.
The room was no more than bare walls and floors. The furniture was gone, as was the rickety stand lamp with a shade the colour of old teeth. Even her gladii were missing from the polished wooden mantelpiece. Her boots echoing off the bare surfaces, Chester stepped onto the space her ancient sofa had once occupied.
“More spring that stuffing,” Jann had said about it.
It had sat here for years, immune to dust and progress and changing fashions, until it had saved Chester’s life by shielding her from the worst of the blast. She had a vague memory of an armchair saving a legionnaire’s life from a separatist’s bomb in Castle Brecan many years ago.
“Saved by a sofa and an armchair.” Chester’s smile had no humour in it. Maybe she should suggest her legions ride into battle on motorised furniture with floral patterns for meadow combat or a light dusting of beige for desert warfare. “Winter?” she said, in the overeager tones of a jobbing voice actor. “No problem, add this handy white throw for maximum camouflage.”
The hole the sofa had left behind seemed warped, as if it there was more space missing than it had taken up. The hole Jann had left, a woman who Chester had wanted for more than just friendship, seemed bigger. Buttoning down the surge of rage and tears, she studied what had once been her home.