Numenera

by Monte Cook

  “Um… like what?”

  “No, not with your voice. With your mind. Think it at me.”

  I feel stupid doing this.

  YES!

  “Too loud,” he said. Which sounded weird, since the room itself had been silent.

  “Sorry,” she said. “They’ve only got a few uses each. I’m not sure why. They just seem to fizzle out after a few thoughts. So don’t sing into it or anything. You’ll use it up.”

  “Delgha, have you ever heard me sing anything?”

  “No,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ve noticed that people think things in their mind all the time that they don’t say out loud.”

  “So you can actually read my mind with this? Aviend will think you’re taking her job.”

  “No, not really. Only when you actively send things to me. It’s more like… ah… I don’t have an analogy. But your thoughts are safe. Mostly. I’m pretty sure.”

  “I’m convinced,” he said, not at all convincingly.

  He slipped out through the tunnel – singing a short song to Delgha on the way, because he couldn’t not – and then stepped into the woods.

  She didn’t say anything back in his mind, but he could hear her yelling “Stop it!” down the tunnel.

  Night hadn’t fallen yet in the Stere, but it was coming. Black bleeding down through the blue. It made him think of Rillent, of course. Standing, flying, on his kubric. Playing god to his people.

  Kyre didn’t call Aviend’s name. Instead, he lifted his hands to his mouth and breathed through the careful holes between his fingers.

  There was no response.

  He found Aviend’s tracks, knew they were recent from the sharpness of the muddy imprint. He followed them around the corner toward the edge of the swamp.

  And there, in front of him, rose the temple.

  It seemed as natural as if it had always been there and as foreign as he imagined it would be to come upon a city where just a moment before there had been none. The globed dome shone black, rounded edges, smooth lines. It wasn’t even camouflaged. Surely it had been, though, right? They hadn’t just bypassed this a hundred thousand times and not noticed it?

  His mind kept trying to tell him that it was so. That they’d just walked by it and hadn’t been able to see it. Which might be close to the truth. He wondered if Delgha’s fiddling with the devices in the temple had caused it to appear.

  Aviend’s footprints were here, though. Which meant she’d seen this too. And what would she have done? Touched something, he thought. Touched whatever she wasn’t supposed to have touched.

  A door beckoned, grey on grey. Kyre never would have seen it, if not for Aviend’s footsteps up to it. Without hesitating – Aviend might be in there – he put his hand to the flat of it and pushed. Not only did it not budge, but it seemed to push back at him. Actively resistant. It was an odd sensation, and one that he didn’t expect from a door. He tried again, only to find himself getting the same result.

  There were no more footsteps elsewhere. No other sign of Aviend. This door didn’t seem to go to the temple, at least not the part of the temple they’d found. So that meant… what? It went somewhere else?

  He remembered the feeling of touching the device before. The way it made it seem like it was trying to transport him to somewhere else. Had that happened to Aviend?

  Delgha, he thought, and he hoped that she could actually hear him. I think you should come outside. There’s something you have to see.

  Aviend hasn’t found food. Or water. Or an exit, for that matter. But she’s found something far more interesting, if less life-sustaining.

  Aviend hasn’t found food. Or water. Or an exit, for that matter. But she’s found something far more interesting, if less life-sustaining.

  At least I won’t be bored when I die, she’s decided.

  At the back of the forest room where she entered – in her mind, she calls it the glade – she’d found three entryways, each with a slightly different shape. The one on the right, in the shape of a simple rectangle, leads to nothing. A tall square box that seems to go up and up but has nothing inside it.

  The doorway on the right is low and wide. She’d had to kneel down to try to go through it. It’s covered with a film, blue-grey and rubbery. She tried to slice through it with her blade. The rubber split and then reformed. No scar. No sign that she’d even marred its surface.

  The door in the middle is a tall rectangle, topped with a series of tendrils. More animal than plant.

  On the other side of it is a room. The floor is bumpy and squishes as she walks. Not like mud or dirt. Like walking across the back of a giant creature. A frog or a salamander. Mottled like skin too, a bright red and green. But not wet.

  The room is shaped like a triangle, the top pointed far too high for her to reach. A three-sided pyramid.

  The walls are made of firm bubbles. She pushes against them in various places. They’re so soft she thinks she might have found a way out. But even with her knife, they don’t burst or open in any way.

  There is something inside some of them, though. Tiny bodies, she thinks. Unmoving. Of what? As soon as she sees that, she stops trying to split them open. If they’re hatchlings, she doesn’t want to kill them. If they’re predators, she doesn’t want to let them out.

  She feels weird being in the room with a bunch of creatures, all waiting for… something. But this is where she found the thing and it doesn’t seem to be moveable. So if she wants to look at it, it will have to be here.

  The thing is a book. Or something enough like a book that she can understand how it works.

  It’s resting on a dais in the middle of the room. There’s a kind of box that’s umber and gold around the edges. Inside of that is the booklike device.

  There are only two pages, if you can call them that. They’re both thick as her fingers. They don’t move, but if she flows her hands over them, the writing on the pages changes. She learned this mostly by accident. But now she can’t stop flipping through them. She hasn’t found a beginning or an end yet. Unless it’s an endless circle. But none of the two pages seem alike, so she thinks that it might just be a really, really long book.

  All of them are languages she doesn’t know – but there seem to be many. She’s no expert in languages, of course. Knows only the Truth. Doesn’t even speak to machines. But she can spot the difference in how the letters are used. And some have letters that aren’t really letters at all, at least not that she knows of. Every few pages, there are images interspersed with the text.

  The drawings make a little more sense. Not whole sense. But enough to start piecing things together. Sometimes an image takes shape, not on the page but above it. Taking on corners and angles and depth. The kubrics show up regularly, and they always rise off the page. The temple. Even a thing that she thinks might be where she is right now – a giant star in the sky that isn’t really a star, but made to look like one. Looking down on the earth.

  She doesn’t think about that last one too much because it makes her feel lonely and small and afraid. And she doesn’t have time for lonely and small and afraid right now. She needs to figure out what this place is, what it does, and how it works so she can find her way home.

  The drawings seem to imply that the kubrics are a machine. Or, rather, each is a single part of a larger machine. With the… star… she doesn’t have a better word… they form a device that does…what? What does it do? And why does Rillent care?

  Step back. Walk through it.

  Rillent had come to the clave and taken power. Why? Because he was a power-hungry monster. No, why had he come to the clave? Because he found… bought… stole? a key – his implant – and he’d followed it here.

  He’d killed Aviend’s mother – denounced her as a traitor to the city – and announced himself the leader. Arch Boure.

  Together, with Kyre at his side, he’d begun digging up the kubrics. Gaining power, slowly. Methodically. Getting the people to trust him and then
flipping his story, his promises. Trapping them tighter and tighter like the squeeze of a cragworm.

  And then… what?

  She flips through the images. There. The kubrics and the star are connected via some kind of energy lines. Why? Another image, the next page and…

  If she’d been holding the book, she would have dropped it. As it is, she stumbles backward. Hands up. Wincing from a pain that never comes.

  The destriatch. The destriatch are on these pages. Not the same – these are full creatures. Holeless. Solid. Whatever chased her through the woods, nearly killed her, they’re a smidgen of the creatures created on these pages.

  But they’re not killing people in these images. Not hunting. Not tracking. They’re protecting. Protecting the base, their base, a whole line of them, their glorious, deadly gazes turned outward.

  “Rillent is doing them wrong,” she says. There’s some kind of hope in that realization and she grasps it tight. She touches the black and grey drawing. Traces it with a trembling finger. “He’s making them, but something’s missing. What?”

  This, she thinks. This place, this sixth point of the star. That’s what he’s missing. She thinks of the message from the well. Unable to find key. They thought it was the runners unable to find some way to access Rillent. But what if it actually meant Rillent was unable to find the key he needed?

  What if this, this place, is the key that Rillent can’t find?

  Oh, skist. She understands it all.

  All right, not all. But enough that it makes her feel dizzy.

  Rillent has been uncovering the kubrics to gain power for himself. Not to give power to the Stere as he’d promised. Not for the people. Not even, as he professes, for the Order of Truth. For himself. Only for himself. What she, nor anyone else really understands, is how? What do the kubrics actually do? They seem to give him certain capabilities – she already knows that. He created the destriatch, for one thing. Performs other mysterious “miracles”. But he keeps driving. The trenchers keep working. He keeps striving for something. But what? And for what purpose?

  She doesn’t know yet. But now, this book, or manual, or guide, or whatever it is, is starting to make one thing clear. Whatever he is trying to accomplish, there is a giant hole in Rillent’s plan. He doesn’t have the final key. That’s what he’s been looking for. That’s why he didn’t care enough to come after them. He thinks he’s so close to finding it. But he’s not. He’s not. He’s not.

  Because it’s right here, and he’s not looking at her. Not looking up.

  For the first time, Aviend feels a sense of hope and relief. And maybe even excitement. They’re one step ahead of Rillent. As long as they can keep him from finding the temple and this place, they can keep him from completing his plan. Whatever horrors that might entail.

  We’re going to beat you, she thinks. Because we’re good and right and true. But mostly because we’re smarter than you are.

  Well, provided she can find a way back from here. A way to warn the others. A plan is beginning to form. Better than their old one, because she knows so much more. Because she understands – maybe for the first time – Rillent. Rillent’s needs. Rillent’s weakness.

  She’d never believed his lies about helping the Stere, but she had once thought he was accidentally corrupted by his own greed. Or by the kubrics. They pulled at Kyre, why wouldn’t it make sense that they would also pull at Rillent in some way? And Rillent, she’d thought Rillent had just said yes.

  But now she saw him for what he was. Evil to the core. He’d never come to the Stere with the hopes of saving it or helping it. He hadn’t been corrupted by power. He had corrupted his power for his own gain. From the moment he’d arrived, he’d known what he was doing. What he was hoping to do.

  He’d known the kubrics were here before he’d arrived. He’d come here, not as an envoy from the Order of Truth, but as something else. As…what? A monster. No, that was too simple. There was something else buried in her memory. Very early. Rillent’s eyes, in her brain. She can’t… she reaches for it, but can’t quite grab it. It’s slippery, and it’s a place she doesn’t like to look because it’s dark and filled with blame and guilt and a deep-rooted fear that she is the one who brought Rillent here. Or at the very least, that she’s the one who opened the door for him.

  She gives up after a moment. Tells herself she can’t remember. But knows that she might be lying to herself. Can’t and don’t want to are sometimes so closely entwined it’s hard to tell them apart.

  Back to problem number one. How to get out of here. The book doesn’t have anything in it that seems to pertain to that. Which means that traveling back and forth was either not something that people did – but here she is, so that seems to belie that idea – or it was something they did so often and easily that there was no reason to write up anything about it.

  Funny that, how one person’s easy was another person’s wish-for-detailed-instructions. “Thank Gavani for groups,” she says. The name feels funny in her mouth, but she doesn’t dislike it. She’s not a believer, but sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s not a swearword.

  She’ll start back at the door where she entered. She’d pushed buttons on the way in. Although she hadn’t seen buttons on this side, that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Another thorough look certainly wouldn’t–

  And then she is falling through the invisible floor. Not falling. Being pulled. Rocked, was maybe the best word she found for it. Rocked and falling down. It was bright again. Too much so to open her eyes. The red rivers of her eyelids flowed in her gaze. Backlit by sun. There is no sound. So quiet she feels like she can hear the rushing rivers of red. Her blood. Pulsing.

  Darkness comes on slowly, blots out the rivers. The rocking ends. There is the sense of being touched. Not by hands, but by something else. Something that is mostly ethereal, electrical. There but not there.

  She doesn’t want to open her eyes. She feels suddenly sure that she is floating in space somewhere, and that these things touching her are creatures. Dead stars. The ghosts of the sky. Who knows? She can’t run. She can’t move. Trapped in nothing. This, she thinks with rising horror and sadness, is how she’s always been afraid things will end.

  Delgha saw what Kyre was seeing too, thankfully. Lately, he had moments where he was sure he was starting to lose his mind. Not unheard of. There were stories of those who’d left Rillent’s side in the past coming unmoored. Losing their way. Believing they were already ghosts. Those were the only ones you heard about, though. The ones who came unmoored while still attached to Rillent were ghosts. Or dead anyway. Buried under the wolflilies. Unless, of course, they went crazy in a way that benefited Rillent’s plan.

  So he was not crazy. At least not yet, and that was good.

  Delgha took one look at the temple, risen out of nothing, at the blinding outline of the star that seemed to form a door and said, “Don’t touch that.”

  “She went through there, didn’t she?” It was the kind of question Kyre was sad to have asked, because he already knew what the answer would be.

  “Knowing her? Yes.”

  It wasn’t a regular door. You could tell just by looking at it, how the light shone out around the edges of it, even though there was no visible break in the material that he could discern.

  “It’s possible that it’s just another door that leads to the temple, the one the Gavanites spoke of.” The hope in his voice was false. He was grateful Delgha didn’t even try to placate him with a response.

  “We need to get back inside. See what we can learn from the devices.”

  They didn’t run – that would have implied something neither of them was ready to handle – but they moved fast through the woods and tunnels, grabbing Thorme with a shout on the way by. Kyre had a tumbling, scratching moment of panic that they would find the interior doorway to the temple closed and sealed, inoperable. But it stood as it had when they’d left, irised open into the blackness.

  Witho
ut even taking a breath, Delgha half-buried herself in equipment, muttering.

  Even after everything that had happened earlier, if Delgha asked him to hold something or touch something, Kyre would do it, without question. It might shock him again, pull him elsewhere, knock him to the floor. Whatever. As long as they got Aviend back from wherever the temple door had taken her.

  Thorme was on standby, her med kit open on the floor. She had a boost in each hand.

  The stars overhead were bright enough that they lit the whole room. As Kyre watched, the sky descended into half-darkness, a purple spread that rang a memory for him. It was gloaming. That meant Rillent was probably standing on his false riser, that in one, two, three… the kubric would go dark before blaring back into light.

  The stars went out. Or nearly. Became pinpoints of barely there light, impossible to find or see if he hadn’t been staring right at them.

  “What is…?” Delgha said, her voice muffled from under a now-shadowed device. He heard a clonk from somewhere in the darkness that sounded an awful lot like a soft body part against a hard machine-edge. It was followed by a hissing release of breath.

  “Rillent,” he said. But it wasn’t quite what he meant. He was piecing it together in his head. Was Rillent drawing energy from the… stars?… to power himself? That was impossible, wasn’t it?

  Of course it was. But what if the stars in the temple weren’t the actual stars in the sky? They already seemed much larger and brighter. What if they were just representations of something else – a way to monitor or gauge energy, maybe? But why would something here be linked to something going on with the kubrics? It made no sense. But it didn’t seem like a coincidence.

  Before he could put it all together, the room blazed with light. The stars were as bright as they’d been moments ago.