Numenera

by Monte Cook

  If it wasn’t for Thorme saying, “That was odd,” he might have thought he’d made it up. Or that his eyes were losing their ability to work properly.

  Now that it was bright again, it was harder to put his idea to words. It seemed silly, in the light, to think that it was linked to the kubrics. Why would that be? What’s the common denominator? He had no idea. “That blink? I think it times exactly to the moment the kubrics go dark.”

  He left the thought there, waiting to see what conclusions the others would come to.

  Delgha pulled herself from under the device, wiping something off her face with the back of her hand.

  “That would mean that the kubrics are linked to this temple,” she said. “We knew the temple was old – far older than the Gavanites that used this place. What if it was originally not a temple, but something else?”

  The same question he was asking. “The kubrics draw in energy. And this place shows the energy reserves that they store. But where’s the energy that they absorb coming from in the first place?”

  “That’s not a technology I’ve ever seen,” Delgha said. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve come to believe that anything is possible.”

  They were all staring, heads back, at the stars, which seemed, impossibly, to be staring back. Kyre had never felt so… looked at. Like the distant past was gazing right at him.

  “We need to find out the connection,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Guess we’d better find a way to figure out where Aviend is then and get her back,” Delgha said. “We’re going to need all of us to figure this out.”

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  “Use your crazy weird ability to understand Aviend’s mind to figure out where she is, while I get this device to work,” Delgha said. “Besides, I’m getting close. I think.”

  Then a moment later, “No. No, I’m not. I don’t know where she is or what this does. I’m completely flying blind here. This is ridiculous.”

  By her uncertainty, he could tell she was moving through the machines by instinct more than by knowledge.

  But of course, instinct was bolstered by knowledge, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that what he and Aviend had too? A sense of things, indescribable, unscientific, that passed between them? Based on the way they knew each other so well. Their lives and secrets and moments shared. A language all their own.

  So where was she? He closed his eyes and imagined her for a moment, as she must have been when she discovered the temple. The way she’d stop and take it in for only a moment before she’d put her hands against it, make sure it was real. She had to touch things in order to understand them. So she would have touched it, without hesitation, without doubt.

  Where he stepped back and thought things through, she went up and put her hands against them. He thought that’s why she understood him so well. She could touch him, always, and often did.

  So she would have touched the temple. And the door. Would it have opened for her?

  Enter and the stars shall touch you.

  Yes.

  He opened his eyes and found he was still looking skyward. Just above him, a single star shone with a brightness abandoned by the others. It had a reddish cast about it that the others did not. He found that if he squinted, he could almost make out its shape. Six points. Clear, where the others were squiggly pinpoints of light.

  “She’s up there,” he said.

  Delgha’s head clonked the back of a machine part, the thunk followed by a sharp swear, as she strove to pull her head out from inside it and follow his gaze.

  “She’s on the roof?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “She’s up there.”

  He pointed to the stars. To one star in particular.

  “Well, skist,” Delgha said. “How do we get up there?”

  “That’s your job, I think,” he said. “I hope. Because I have no idea.”

  “Vi. Vi. Vi.”

  The call, like a bird, mimicking voices she knows. Echoing. Repeating. It’s a loop. A trick. She refuses to answer. I know you, she thinks, even though she doesn’t, and I will not go to you. In fact, she can’t move. She’s stuck. Pulled and pulsed and tied with invisible threats.

  “Vi.” This time the bird sounds like Kyre. Is it Kyre? Something takes her wrist and lifts her arm. Her palm comes to hair and skin and a ring of metal. When she opens her eyes, Kyre is smiling down at her. The biggest smile she has ever seen on him.

  Behind his head, the stars are giant and red and they pulse down around them and light their way. She can hear Delgha muttering at a machine farther away.

  “Kyre,” she says.

  “You came through like a ghost,” he says.

  She gets what he means. She feels like a ghost. As if she left part of herself behind on the star and it’s only slowly catching up to her.

  “I know…” She’s hesitant to overstate. “…what Rillent’s looking for. I might have a plan.”

  “We know where he’s getting his power,” Kyre says. “We might have a plan too.” He’s holding her hand. She’s not sure when that happened. Has he always been holding her hand and she just noticed? “So together we should be doing good.”

  “In mine, you don’t have to kill anyone.”

  “In mine, you don’t die.”

  “Let’s do them both, then,” she says.

  That was supposed to be funny, but as the sentence ends, the part of her that felt like it was catching up to her does so. All at once. The weight of her body doubles, triples. Her bones leaden. Skull too. The floor pushes back at her, keeps her forever. She can’t feel her chest rising. Somewhere there are voices. She knows they’re not hers, because that would require movement and she doesn’t know how to do that anymore.

  Hands and faces. Thorme’s fingers inside her mouth. Aviend is swallowing something, but then it comes back the other way, a gagging horror that stops her breath. She forces her lids closed against the noise and light and pain. For long minutes, she is a sinking painweight. Nothing more.

  How long has passed? She doesn’t know. She is still heavy, but the pain is a dull echo at the back of her skull. She opens her eyes. Everyone is looking at her.

  “Well,” Delgha says. “Let’s not do that again.”

  She doesn’t have the strength to say they have to do that again. That it’s the very thing they have to do if they want to take Rillent down.

  Later, she thinks. I’ll tell her later. She sleeps.

  Three days. That’s how long Kyre sat at Aviend’s bedside while she recovered. Thorme brought him food and promises that she was going to be fine. Delgha brought him devices to mend. Things she didn’t even need fixed, but she carried them in, asking for help. He worked on them because he couldn’t stand the sitting, but didn’t say what he felt – that nothing he fixed mattered, because he couldn’t fix the one thing that did matter.

  He was working on some kind of memory drone, tiny pieces that made his fingers ache, when Aviend finally woke.

  “I’m starving,” she said, startling him into dropping the drone, which shattered across the floor. “And what the skist is that noise?”

  She looked alive, but not yet well. Black moons rose beneath her eyes and her skin had a flatness to it, a grey tinge that worried him. So many emotions across his heart, under his skin. Words were tricky things, elusive and unforgiving. When you stopped using them, they slipped away just to teach you a lesson. “And why are you way over there?”

  She reached for him and he went to her, knowing he should call Thorme. Or be worried about hurting her. Or ask her if she felt all right. But he just held her, silent, until their breathing synced and he got his heartbeat back.

  Thorme didn’t even tsk her tongue at him when she came in later and found them talking, Aviend telling the story of her time in the star and what she’d learned, him telling her about Rillent’s power source. Thorne did do a bunch of things with Aviend’s wrists and mouth and eyes and even her fingers
, until Aviend said, “Stop, Thorme. Stop. I’m fine.”

  “You are,” Thorme agreed. “But I’m the chiurgeon and you will hush.”

  Aviend did so, casting a sly glance at Kyre, who couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing, finally earning him a customary Thorme tongue-click. Half of it was the humor. The other half was clean and utter relief.

  “No outside for three days,” Thorme said as she finished giving Aviend her once over. “And all of this. I’ll bring you a crossel berry muffin.” She set down a clear vial filled with green liquid.

  “Two days,” Aviend said, holding up as many fingers. “Half of this nastiness. And all of the muffins I want.”

  “I don’t bargain with patients,” Thorme said. “But I do let them out early for good behavior.” She looked pointedly at the vial.

  “But,” Aviend said, “I know what this tastes like… Look, I’m complaining. Doesn’t that mean I’m feeling–”

  “Six days and no muffins,” Thorme said.

  “No,” Aviend said. “Fine.” She picked up the vial, then opened it and sneered. “Ghostfell, it’s like death in a jar, Thorme. I swear it doesn’t have to taste like this. You just like watching us drink this horror. Seriously, what have I done to hurt you so badly?”

  “Drink it,” Thorme said, “while I see how many muffins we have left.”

  As soon as Thorme stepped from the room, Aviend held the vial out to Kyre. He gagged softly; the smell really was putrid. What did she put in those things?

  “Would you like some yummy drink, kind person?” Aviend said. “It’s very tasty and yours for the low price of zero shins.”

  “I will do a lot for you, but that might be beyond even me.”

  “Kyre, please… I’m dying for muffins. I’m so hungry. Don’t let her take away my muffins, Kyre.”

  “I’m tempted to say something about how it should teach you not to touch things, but I don’t want you to extend that to me,” he said.

  “You’re a horrible, horrible partner,” she said. “The worst.”

  And then she tried to throw back the entire vial in a single gulp. The liquid puffed out her cheeks, and the noise that came out of her was something akin to a wild thing trying to mate in the woods. For a second, he thought she was going to spit the entire thing across the room. But somehow she swallowed it down, the swears rolling off her tongue so fast he could barely keep up with them.

  “One day!” she yelled. “One day and all the muffins!”

  In truth, it was two days before Aviend was out of bed and another two before she felt good enough to be up and about most of the day. Thorme kept pumping Aviend full of horrible liquids, Delgha was hovering more than usual, and by day five, it was clear that the lack of progress and the too-much hovering were starting to make everyone grumpy.

  So when Kyre suggested they go to the valley, just the two of them, Aviend was nearly out the door before he’d finished the sentence. They made sure that no one saw them go. Not that Thorme would have tried to stop them – probably – but surely someone would have offered to come with them, and if there was one thing they desperately needed, it was not another hovering, worried creature at their sides. The millibirds didn’t count. Nor the far-off calls of the broken hounds that stalked the river’s edges.

  The scent of wolflilies – honey and death – arrived before the purpled sight of them. This valley was filled with the blooms, long human-sized trenches that belied their beauty. Aviend’s mom was here. Kyre’s dad. Most of the rest of his family too. Or at least he thought so. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter. They came either way, because someone’s loved ones were here and they believed in honoring that.

  No ghosts walked these channels. Coincidence, or perhaps the wolflilies kept them away.

  “Or the bodies,” Aviend said. “Maybe it’s all the bodies.”

  On the way, she’d plucked a bouquet of flowers – everything except wolflilies – and the crimson and golden hues seemed to light up her face. She looked healthier now – they still didn’t know what had gone wrong with their process of getting her back, although Delgha was working on it – but he no longer worried that she was going to die right in front of him.

  Aviend broke the bouquet in half and held them out.

  Kyre shook his head. “I apologized last time I was here,” he said. “I don’t even think I knew what for then. My dad would have been ashamed of me if I’d taken a man’s life.”

  “Even a man like Rillent,” Aviend agreed.

  It was all right for her to say that, now that they were going to put a new plan together, one that didn’t involve killing anyone.

  They didn’t have a plan yet, though. First, they had to figure out how to get themselves to the star and back consistently without making themselves sick. They needed more information if they were going to use their secret to take Rillent down, and the only way to get that was to travel back there.

  “I almost forgot that we lived in a forest,” he said. “And not just in a building with stars for a ceiling.”

  “It is good to be outside. Even if I’m sure that Rillent is just around every corner or there’s a destriatch behind every tree. I mean, I know he’s not coming for us. But knowing and believing aren’t always the same thing.”

  “Don’t forget slistoviles,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I saw one this morning.”

  “You’re a horrible person,” she said. But she was smiling and that was good.

  Shaking her head, she moved toward a mound near the end of the long line of mounds. He stopped and let her go. He’d loved Aviend’s mom as his own, but she wasn’t his. And there were times when you needed to be alone with someone whom you belonged to, even if that someone was dead.

  Turning, he walked to the other edge of the valley. At some point Rillent had stopped even pretending to cover his deeds, laying down bodies without cover. But someone had kept up with the attempt. Here, the wolflilies were younger, their blossoms daintier. Planted not so long ago. He wondered about the person, or people, who came here to do so. Rillent’s trenchers, the ones he sent out with others’ bodies? Or someone who watched and waited, came here after, to give the dead some semblance of their due? He would like to thank that person for the kindness given to strangers. Such a small thing.

  Far off in the trees, a soft shimmer of grey moved haltingly. Made a gesture as if to open a door that wasn’t there. It was the first time he’d seen a ghost this close to the valley.

  “Ready?” Aviend asked. She no longer had her bouquet; he could see its brightness resting where she’d placed it across the way.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She followed his gaze.

  “You’re thinking about ghosts.”

  He had been, in a way.

  “Real ones, or imagined?”

  “What’s the difference?” He meant it as serious, but it came out as a bit plucky. He was startled and surprised to hear her laugh, a quick airpush of sound.

  “Ah… I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to ask at the time.”

  “Then yes,” he said. “Where do you think they come from?”

  Aviend lifted a hand to shade her eyes and squinted into the dark of the forest. The shape there had stopped and seemed to be looking at them. It was too far away to see a face, but he swore he could see the flow of clothing as it moved.

  “Do they seem…” The word he was thinking was “brighter”. “More real than before?”

  She sucked in her cheeks and closed her eyes, as if she was thinking. By the time she answered, the ghost was gone. Faded or disappeared or just walked away, he couldn’t tell.

  “I think they are more real than before,” she said. “But why?”

  To solve any problem, you have to fail one hundred times. Maybe two hundred. You have to despair and howl and have run into so many mental walls that your whole brain is a mass of bruises. At least that’s how it feels to Aviend at this point.

  For days, she and De
lgha and Kyre have worked in near-silence on what Aviend has started calling “that horrendous beast in the hall,” trying to figure out the mechanism in the starroom that will get them safely to the star and back. Everything hinges on it.

  Delgha has been working diligently, fingers and brain, with Kyre and Aviend helping. And they’ve gotten nowhere with it. Aviend has come to hate it, even as she respects it and whatever entities created it. It’s complex, furious, and infuriating. Every time they change something, it squawks and calls, panicked and alarming, its caws echoing through the entire base. And every little bit of Aviend’s head.

  Some parts of it are so tiny she can’t possibly get her fingers in there to tweak things, so she’s started using tiny bits of thick wire as extensions of her digits. Which works great until she pokes a piece in between two portables and gets back a shock that runs all the way up her arm to her shoulder and into the back of her teeth. It catches her tight for a moment, shakes her to the very insides, and then does little jumpstarts along the pulse in her neck. She hears the screamsong of the destriatch in the base of her ears.

  But no, it’s just the machine screaming. The screech of metal grinding into metal.

  It’s like her life has a theme lately, and it’s all about her blood turning into a pain-carrying electrical current.

  “I hate you,” she says to the machine, with no small amount of untruth. She is tempted to kick it – she has good enough boots on to get away with it – but Kyre’s inside it currently, and she’s still vibrating from the electricity that punched through her body. Unwilling to risk that again.

  “It seems to hate you too,” Kyre says as he pokes his head out of one of the machine’s widest openings. There’s mirth in his voice. For a moment, she’s pretty sure she hates him too.

  “I’m glad you’re taking this seriously,” she says, and shakes her head as soon as her mouth closes. She didn’t mean that. Working in this close proximity to the star without being able to get there makes her frustrated, and every once in a while, she gets a muscle memory of herself in here, dead weight. Unable to move or scream or breathe. It all swirls inside her in a dangerous detonation of emotions. Sometimes she forgets to keep her thumb on the safety latch. “Sorry,” she says.