Jadde - The Fragile Sanctuary

by Clive Ousley

  The next red glow ignited in her hand and she glanced along the smoke fogged letters. She had been right, and gripped the door handle.

  The sign had said General-commander Jadde.

  As soon as she entered, lights flickered and went out with loud pops, but one stayed powered, enough for her to see around.

  A large desk filled the centre of the room with a modest but comfy chair behind it. On the desk sat the obligatory computer and behind sat a table and cabinets with drawers. On the wall a plaque announced.

  United States Research Centre G-DNA2

  A faded photo on the wall had a line of words beneath describing the man as President of the United States of America. On the desk sat dust covered pens, glass weights holding down paper, a fascinating picture file stood with a title January 2046 with individual days numbered, coloured files lay arranged neatly alongside a photo of two children. But on top of all the neat organisation, a couple of grubby pages lay with ragged edges as if torn from another document. In the dim light she bent over and read.

  It was part of an account by someone called Morris-Tailt. Then she read a strange meaningless jumble about quarter-men and hidden weapons. A line leapt at her about the Goddess Jadde. But she was no Goddess and had died of some illness.

  After a time to get over the misuse of the Goddess’s name she carried on reading. The place name ‘underground laboratory’ was used. That was where she was now, she realised.

  Finally another hand had written a footnote and signed it Kristopher Falconfeather.

  She thrust the yellowed pages into her skirt’s pocket alongside the golden sun. If she could just get out of here she could find Malkrin and surprise him with another mysterious gift.

  Back in her usual seat in the canteen Cabryce sat and ate the last of the sealed food. She took another look at the pages containing Jadde’s name, used as if the writer was confident Jadde was not a Goddess, but a person of importance. She withdrew the golden sun idly examining it; then clasped it and dozed.

  And in her dreams a woman’s voice spoke to Cabryce, and she talked back telling it of her troubles and her plight. The voice promised it would help, and asked some questions which Cabryce tried to answer.

  She woke refreshed, feeling as if Jadde herself had spoken – refuting her death described by Kristopher Falconfeather.

  Cabryce decided to carry on down the corridor of many names, determined to see where it ultimately led. Then she remembered the dream voice and paused, its exact argument filled her head. In the dream she, Cabryce, had just described the snowploughs and the other vehicles.

  ‘If the cavern contains these metal monsters then they had to have been brought in somehow Cabryce’.

  ‘They may have been built in here.’

  The dream voice had countered, ‘to do that would need greater engineering facilities than it would appear your retreat contains. Look for a very large door.’

  She envisaged a large ornate door like the one that fronted The great Hall of Justice. ‘There is no such door, my Dream Mistress.’

  ‘Look anyway Cabryce.’ The dream voice had requested.

  Although annoyed with the futility of the task, Cabryce did as the dream voice had asked her – just in case when the next time she slept the voice returned to scold her.

  She stood in front of the fire-tender; it was backed against the wall that led to the computer rooms and canteen. Would it have been pushed in that far? She walked to the front of the first snowplough. There was plenty of room around the front and she looked at the wall noticing it was smooth rather than the irregular texture of the painted-rock side wall or the large brick patterns of other walls. It was patterned with reinforcing struts welded to large metal sheets. The whole surface was dented and bowed. But all the dents faced toward her, showing whoever had hammered on the metalwork had done so from outside.

  What manner of a monster could have tried to gain admittance? Cabryce hardly dared think as she touched the cold surface and paint flaked off revealing brown corroded metal. There was no way the colossal structure could open. She saw a couple of large pushbuttons and walked to the corner. The equipment manuals had shown other control-buttons where red meant close and green meant open; so she fully pressed the green button. Nothing happened, not even a creak. She gave up after the third press and stood back. After a few frustrated breaths she realised the latticework of struts fell short in an area to one side of the dented and warped metal. It was a small door within a large door. She walked up and examined it. It was at her height and rectangular in shape, with a contoured groove where fingers could be placed to pull a recessed handle sideways. She did so and something gave with a gritty crunch. Two tugs later she still could not free it and grabbed a metal wrecking bar from a workbench. It proved a powerful lever, and with it she wrenched the door open.

  A wall of smashed and cracked boulders greeted her, most so big there was no hope of shifting them. She peered into gaps noticing more boulders behind. At some time there had been a colossal avalanche which had concealed the huge door completely. It accounted for why none of her tribe had ever noticed such an entrance. Then she speculated whether the ancients had created the avalanche to deliberately hide the cavern.

  Dejectedly she returned to the Command Vehicle and picked up more flares – back to the original plan.

  CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN

  Muttering and whispered conversations accompanied the slow progress of the long column of allied tribes. Malkrin rode up and down the column inspiring and urging the people on. During every night’s camp a few foolishly independent individuals disappeared; their heads always found the next morning impaled on stakes. No matter how many sentries were set around the large gathering there appeared to be no stopping the quarter-men beyond the perimeter.

  Even the weather was against them. Blossoming storm clouds led to lashing rain that washed the remaining spirit from all but the Wolf people. They were used to travelling in any weather.

  Malkrin sighed with dismay as he examined another hideous display. It was always placed alongside the sacred trail for all the people to see. Yesterday he had ordered a section of Brenna to ride ahead to bury the remains before the people walked through. That worked and the people missed the hideous spectacle. But today the demons were wise to the tactic and the Brenna had been attacked as they buried the nights’ gruesome harvest. Only two Brenna and a rider-less horse returned and Malkrin reluctantly discussed TrathWolf’s new plan.

  ‘I will lie in wait for the demons through the night with twenty warriors and catch the demons in the act.’

  Malkrin reluctantly agreed, and that night the tribes were woken with shouts and cries of the dying. It was an expensive victory; the six quarter-men had died at the expense of nine Wolf warriors. It would have been ten but Seara awoke and ran with Palreth as escort to heal a warrior.

  Then Malkrin devised an audacious plan to ambush the demons.

  He scouted ahead that evening, before the tribes camped for the night. They were four days from the Wild-cat cave; two brave Brightwater women were with him and a band of selected warriors. Another group of warriors searched the surroundings for watching quarter-men. A rider gave the all-clear signal. Malkrin chose sandy ground and scooped out eight large holes big enough to contain a man each. The women Sattie and Ethy helped bury them under the sandy soil with hollow reeds protruding for Malkrin and his warriors to breathe through. The warriors were buried in a circle around the two women, with Malkrin buried the nearest to them for instant protection. They were instructed to shout, ‘now’ when the shadows beyond the campfire turned into demons.

  It had worked.

  ‘Now. Malkrin, now.’ The words still echoed in his mind. The warriors had leapt out of the soil in the nick of time and caught the overconfident demons as they swept toward the women. All six demons perished without a scratch on the warriors or women.

  Malkrin arrived back just before dawn with his victorious brethren. He passed TrathWolf’s
disappointed face, and could not resist confirming his authority.

  ‘That is how you do things my friend,’ he stated simply and rode off to get some sleep. The next night he set a similar trap with four women, two of which were from the Celembrie and formidable warriors themselves who concealed long throwing knives in their clothes.

  Another triumph, eleven demons died for two wounded. Seara quickly healed them.

  The next night was demon free – they had won a small victory. The column camped the final night around the Wild-cat cave, again without trouble. The next day scouting bands of Brenna and townsmen greeted them and the long journey was over.

  Malkrin gave the officer a brief account of the failed defence of Brightwater, of Boele the Bears death and other Seconchane casualties, and then warned of approaching demon skirmishers.

  ‘We know already Sire Malkrin. We have had lines of Skatheln heads left with blood written warnings about harvesting our souls.’

  ‘I fear you have suffered as we have.’

  ‘Aye, but we found ways of ambushing them.’

  ‘You have lost many warriors?’

  ‘At first yes, but we learnt to make a good accounting. But we have lost the Skatheln people.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They took fright and ran off. The thought of losing their souls was too much for such simple creatures. I had a section catch them but they would not stop and have disappeared into a narrow pass to the highest snow covered regions.’

  Malkrin nodded understanding, ‘Bulwan was a kind but impotent chief. The whole tribe were convinced that the Goddess Jadde was to be found in the mountains. They have gone to seek her protection.’

  Malkrin took Seara and her inseparable friend Palreth together with TrathWolf, BalthWolf, Talgour and Thicheal to a meeting with the Brenna Council. He left the tribes people with the Seconchane officer who gave assurances that they would all be accommodated in the meadows within the Seconchane fortifications.

  A heavy atmosphere pervaded the Hall of Justice, but during the long complex meeting that followed a bond was established between the peoples of all the lands. It was a grim discussion of tactics, and the defence and deployment of all fighters. It would be a battle to possible annihilation and all present knew there would be no second chance to retreat and defeat the quarter-men later.

  Malkrin glanced to Jadde’s altar and remembered his strange encounter with it, and wondered if he could summon his inner eye to risk another view. Would his mind stay intact for long enough to summon her help? He doubted it, after all he’d been through he couldn’t risk throwing everything away in a blind plea that may burn his whole mind this time.

  Sire Steth and Nardin were summoned and they shuffled in with Steth supporting his near blind assistant.

  ‘We . . . have found nothing of the missing diary pages.’ Steth’s voice was loaded with disappointment.

  Nardin took over, ‘But we have discovered much about the origin of the demons.’

  He had the council’s full attention.

  ‘Go on,’ said Bredon the Fox expectantly.

  ‘The ancients created the demons and allowed them the freedom to breed. Then when they had bred in secret multitudes and were killing countless tribes of people, the ancients realised the horror they’d created and made a weapon of great power to destroy the demon scourge. It used something called a biological insecticide that only targeted the quarter-men demons. I have looked in various volumes and found references to human mutations that accidentally combined insect DNA to human DNA and created the quarter-man race. It was this DNA that was somehow the key to creating the weapon.’

  ‘The ancients were not so wise after all; they played with their own doom,’ the Fox stated bitterly.

  Nardin glanced myopically at the intent faces staring back questioningly at him. ‘Indeed Sire. Before the killing began and the weapons were created, politicians and well meaning people decided not to destroy the fast breeding mutants, but allow them to set up their own ghetto. Then when they became uncontrollably aggressive, the ancients guarded them on a remote island. The quarter-men then escaped from this island. I discovered the ancient’s governments allowed more communities elsewhere; the containment problem was kept secret. An unregulated nest was spotted, then another. By then colonies had been allowed worldwide. More unauthorised colonies appeared and spread like a plague. The alarm was raised too late, huge quarter-man nests were detected underground in every remote area worldwide.’

  ‘You use many strange words Researcher Nardin but we understand the gist of your account,’ said the Fox. ‘I cannot believe the ancients were such fools as to allow the demon scourge to prevail when they could have eliminated the creatures before being overwhelmed.’

  ‘They had different values to us Sire. Politics and false morality twisted their thinking into knots and restricted actions to mere containment of the demons at first. Meek minded people would not allow the destruction of sentient beings no matter how evil their intentions. They cried something called ‘human rights’ then ‘quarter-man rights’ which apparently none dared argue against. Then the demons began slaughtering remote tribes, and people still refused to believe it was the quarter-men and put the deaths down to militant human groups called hard-line terrorists.’

  ‘Why is there no evidence in the books of the weapon eventually used to destroy the demons?’ asked Thicheal.

  ‘Because the books were written before the weapon was created. Most were produced before the United Nations proclamation to destroy the quarter-men. However, I am convinced that somewhere nearby lies the remainder of the account which will tell of the solution.’

  ‘Somewhere in Cyprusnia?’ asked council member Erich Gamlyn and Malkrin seethed with imagined thoughts of Cabryce’s encounter with the Brenna Ruler.

  ‘I believe that to be so. The account mentions Second-chance Experimental station. We are the Seconchane. So I think over time our name was derived from the words second chance, which because we live here must mean our direct ancestors succeeded in destroying the quarter-men from here. Therefore the experimental station must be somewhere in or near Cyprusnia.’ Nardin bowed and sat as the meeting erupted in wild conjecture.

  Malkrin lent over Nardin and whispered, ‘4765, what was it?’

  Nardin’s face saddened and his eyes welled up in frustration. ‘I have no idea Malkrin. It would not tie in with any library location, entry number or title. The numbers have been at the forefront of my research but I can find nothing.’

  Malkrin thought back to his brief search in the ancient’s library with Nardin all those weeks before he had led the Seconchane to assist Brightwater. Falconfeather had been very specific about the numbers, which book could they refer too? He pushed the numbers to the back of his mind and thought of the sun and Planets emblem painted so hugely on the far wall. He had seen the emblem on the highsense suns and had marked it as being significant – but what significance he had no idea. He gave up and returned to more pressing matters.

  It was well into the night when The Fox announced the dispositions of defences would be revised to accommodate the influx of tribal warriors. He then announced a short respite for sleep. Malkrin decided early tomorrow he would take Seara to Nardin in the lower library where the quiet atmosphere would allow her to lay her hands on Nardin’s blindness.

  The next day in the library Nardin sat relaxed. Seara stood behind his chair and began by massaging his temples. Her eyes gently closed and a look of warmth spread over her face and in her hands.

  Malkrin allowed her time to work her gift and walked to the giant emblem on the far wall. He read again Morris-Tait’s account and glanced at the biology volumes Nardin had indicated. He couldn’t absorb himself in the research and strode the library trying to pinpoint the curiosity he had in the emblem. It was a more intricate depiction of the gold sun emblems he had taken from the deceased pursuer.

  All the time his mind repeated 4765.

  Finally giving up, he r
eturned to see how Seara progressed. Nardin was slouched in the chair as if asleep, his face had lost that beleaguered look now his eyelids covered his haunted eyes.

  ‘How goes it?’ Malkrin whispered.

  Seara smiled with acknowledgement of a complex healing nearly completed. She had her hands to Nardin’s forehead and Malkrin’s highsense could see her gift transferring like ethereal mist from her hands into Nardin’s face.

  ‘I will return later.’

  He left to supervise the area of the Derant Pass defence the council had allocated him. Hundreds of men and women were frantically completing ditches and using the rocks and soil to raise additional ramparts on either side of the formidable existing palisade. Large stake filled pits had been dug in front of the first line of defence and disguised by a latticework of sticks covered with turf. Young children walked from the town with refreshment and supplies for the people labouring on the constructions. All work had stopped in the fields and only hunters roamed the forests gathering as much game as they could to feed the influx of people. Teams of Celembrie and Wolf hunters also caught game from the plains below Cyprusnia to share with the combined workforce. It was the first evidence of a new trust between the peoples, and Malkrin felt intensely satisfied at the sight.

  Later Bredon the Fox and the Brenna Council rode with a thunder of horse hooves from their homesteads. Along with Malkrin and other sector leaders they surveyed the preparations from a high bluff behind the original palisade. The view from there was tremendous. The snow covered Lachron Mountain rose majestically in the north. To the east, the faint spires of the Brightwater Mountains led down to unseen plains then foothills where Wild-cat cave was situated. To the west, distant mountains apparently contained the Olephate tribe to whom a Celembrie mission had been sent. The south was just a vast expanse of the deadlands. Should black demons swarm from the east, west or south they could be spotted twenty miles away.