by Nick Cole
He was talking to himself. He was aware of that. But the bot didn’t seem to care, or so its programming indicated, and Urmo remained only “Urmo” and nothing more.
“And so where do we go now, master, now that you’ve reached your… ‘lizard king statue’?”
The bot’s question broke Casper’s reverie. He’d been close to completing some thought that meant something. That might unlock the mysteries of the universe that surrounded him. But now it was gone.
“The lizard king will tell us where to go next!” erupted the bot. “You screamed that over and over back in the jungle, master. No matter how I tried to quiet you, you would not relent from proclaiming that hope as loudly as your pitiful lung capacity would allow. That’s what drew those Bronze Age apes out. Your maniacal screaming. Which was a good thing, of course—it’s been so many years in flight time since I have killed anything in mass quantities. It was nice to know I hadn’t lost the touch.”
“Apes?”
“Only vaguely. Definitely simianoid, master. But giant. Four arms. Savage brutes. Some tools. If they had gotten ahold of you they would’ve torn you to shreds. It was all I could do to save your life, master. And I enjoyed the challenge. So there was that.”
Urmo apparently deemed the rat sufficiently cooked, as it fell upon its flesh, tearing and grunting with delight, ever murmuring its own name. It was as if the little creature were killing it all over again with each gusty bite.
“And so I return your drug-ravaged brain to my original query: where do we go now, master? Now that we have reached your lizard king, where shall we spend your few remaining days wandering endlessly on this planet where no one will ever find your body?”
Casper didn’t know. Now, bereft of anything, any idea, of even the basic ability to feel anything other than empty, he had no idea why it had been so important to find the statue—other than that it had been the only observable landmark in the moments before the crash. But a planet, even a small planet, was large. And no man, even over several lifetimes, could search an entire planet for a place no one had ever been to. When he thought about it… it was like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a planet. On foot. Day after day. Surrounded by predators. No sustainable food, water, medicine. The chances that he would die badly were suddenly overwhelming.
He had crossed all the boundaries he’d sworn never to cross, and now… he had no idea where he would find what needed finding. What he had traded everything to find.
The Temple of Morghul was somewhere on this planet… but the words needle in a haystack seemed like the truest words he’d ever heard.
Urmo burped loudly. The sound startled Casper. His nerves were still on edge. When he turned, he saw the little beast looking up reverently at the great statue that loomed over them in the night.
Casper followed the creature’s gaze.
And paused.
He would’ve sworn the statue had been head down, staring at some focus point on the ground just beneath it, ready to greedily receive some sacrifice due to it long ago, its arms stretched out to receive whatever had been offered. But now the flickering firelight and shifting shadows showed the giant half-man, half-lizard staring out across the desert. One long and muscled arm pointed toward the distant horizon, unseen in the starless and wan moonlit night.
At any other time in his life Casper would’ve sworn that it had always been that way. For how could it have been otherwise? Even in the brief moments before the stricken freighter had almost smacked into it dead center…
Which had been an odd thing.
On a vast and empty planet, his freighter, falling out of hyperspace off course and out of control—for no reason that he could diagnose, other than nav and engine failure—in those desperate bare seconds, somehow that freighter had aimed itself straight for the monument.
A monument whose arms were outstretched and waiting to receive a sacrifice. Yes, that’s exactly how it had been.
Except now everything was different.
Now the monolithic edifice was pointing like a signpost on a lost and lonely highway, when the lights have all gone dark and the good people of the galaxy have hidden themselves behind their walls and blast doors. Just as they always had. The statue pointed off into the unknown, disturbing the mind with its promise of a location not yet considered.
Except you, Casper. You’re out here, beyond the perimeter of the known, lost in the dark, and you encounter a sign. A signpost along the road.
But am I at an intersection? he wondered. Is there another choice I’m not seeing? Another option I’m missing? Or is this merely something to remind me where I’ve been headed all along? As if I’ve had no other choice all along.
“I guess we go that way,” he murmured when no other answer called itself out across the high desert night.
The bot clicked and whirred, indicating that it was satisfied with the shape of the next event concerning it.
Casper studied the strange little creature that had found them in the jungle alongside the river, after the behemoth of a lizard had destroyed everything. And for the first time, he sensed something other than just a tribal prehistoric creature with a bare intelligence.
He sensed knowing behind the little creature’s eyes.
And that was when Urmo nodded at him, there in the night, beneath the lizard king, on the high desert ridge, out beyond the known of the galaxy. Nodded as if confirming all the fears Casper had never considered until that moment.
Chapter Twenty-Three
They set off at dawn. Throughout the long night before, the wind had howled and moaned, keening like some wounded animal that could never be comforted in its grief. In the morning they followed the fall of the ridge down onto the dry desert plain, and for a time, by the light of the rising yet dying red dwarf star at their back, everything was revealed with an almost pristine clarity. There was no sign of life, no track, no ruins of the creatures that had long ago erected the enigmatic monument falling away behind them. No ancient road, no structural remains seen through the wind-driven dust. No desert plants, resilient and dangerous. There was only the silence and the distant low moan of the wind as it raced through the broken arroyos and ancient red rock canyons, coming up off a sea of dust that seemed never-ending.
Within hours the desert cool of the night was a thing forgotten, and the air was a dry furnace. As the furious red dwarf neared its zenith, they stopped in the shade of a giant boulder found out on the desert plain. Ahead lay only dunes. Dunes that most likely wandered in their own way back and forth across the wastes, covering anything that ever was. If there had once been landmarks, guideposts, anything at all that might have helped them navigate, it was now buried somewhere out in the sea of sand.
Survival.
He had a day’s worth of water.
“This is madness,” he whispered as he ate one of the few stale nutrition bars that remained.
“What is madness, master? Are you feeling the return of your lunacy? Shall I restrain you? Place my arm in your mouth so that you do not swallow your tongue when you begin to froth in feral madness? It might be best to discuss at what point I should end your suffering. At least while you still retain your limited faculties.”
He ignored the bot.
When the blazing red orb was directly overhead, they headed out again. Casper had instructed THK-133 to maintain the same compass heading, an easy thing for any bot to do. Even now, it seemed to be holding course without the slightest bit of trouble.
Hours passed, and eventually the sun fell toward the horizon. Urmo was content to trudge through the thick dust behind them, following their trail closely. When Casper looked back, he could see that they had mixed all their tracks one after the other. He felt good about that.
And he felt better. He was tired. Thirsty. Burnt. But better. The poisons of the mushrooms had faded, and his rest beneath the giant st
atue had been so untroubled he hardly remembered dreaming, or even waking.
Darkness fell, and just before it did, Casper climbed to the top of a tall dune. He stared out across the dusty sea and searched for anything. Any sign of habitation or landmark. But there was nothing. Nothing but endless desert and a distant haze brought on by some windstorm that obscured what lay beyond.
He sighed and tramped back down the hill.
“Shall we camp here?” asked THK-133. “Full dark will come soon, master. Both moons will be gibbous.”
Casper wasn’t tired. Not yet. And possibly it was better to continue on in the cool of the night. He pulled out his canteen and shook it. Half full. Then he remembered the medical kit. There were hydration tabs in there.
He pulled the medical bag from his ruck. He’d done an inventory at the camp last night, and he couldn’t recall seeing the tabs. Sure enough, they were gone. The soft blue cylinder they came in was empty. In frustration, he flung the useless item away, and the wind came up and carried it into the shadow of a dune. Within seconds, the gently drifting sand had buried it.
If they stopped, he thought, if he gave up, the sand would bury him, too, in just that manner. Softly. Slowly. But steadily. This world would bury him. As though that’s what it had been waiting to do all along.
“Let’s keep moving.”
They set off once more. Into the night, swallowed by the dust and the darkness. Following the barest glint of moonlight reflecting off the killing machine’s armor.
The Lesson of Names
Long has the student trained within the temple. Years have passed, and whoever he once was is gone now. Washed away. Who he is… or rather who he is becoming… that’s becoming clearer and clearer every day. Like a body of water, once disturbed by a thrown rock, settling back to its equilibrium, revealing not just the mountains and forest that surround the high lake, but the sky above and even the stars beyond.
The waters are settling.
A new picture is being revealed.
As has been said before… time does not matter within the temple. All the years in which the student has trained seem like days. And some days seem like centuries. The temple is not a safe place. There are in fact many places in which one can become lost—forever, notes the Master on occasion. The sanctuaries, the lowers halls, and the “other” places the temple connects to.
On the day the student learned what this power was actually called, he was following the Master out into the crumbling reaches of the Cathari Tombs. They had been walking for days down the Hall of Lost Kings. The student knew that days had passed because in the crumbling roof above he could see the night sky, then the daylight, and then the night again, several times over.
He knows how to read the runes now.
Knows what they mean.
He has, on this long journey through the crumbling tombs of the Hall of Kings, long since given up on reading their names, stamped upon their sealed tombs.
Xur Ilgon the Unquenchable.
Xur Slighyth the Wounded.
X’ao Moloth the Damned.
X’ao Byyal the Ruiner of Stars.
X-unth Tigla Polazaar the Defiler of the Central Core.
X-Um Hadezzarrix the Vanquisher of Light.
And so on and so on.
“Who are these?” asks the student in the almost reverential silence of the place. Only the padding of their bare feet makes any sound here.
“Who is anyone?” mumbles the Master as he continues forward into the darkness.
In the night they make a fire, breaking up a once-ornate carving of the obscene sacking of some lost city. Lizard warriors, wielding ebony blades of darkness and carrying something that reminds the student of the heavy blaster carried by the Legion at Karthae, rape and pillage a race unknown. The student studies as much of this as he can before the flames consume the ornate carving the size of a door.
Who is anyone? he thinks, and wonders who they all once were.
In the silence, eating the bread they baked three days ago within the Master’s sanctum, the student wonders at the meaning of their titles.
He hears the Master, who is intent over his dry and tasteless bread, chuckle softly to himself. It is the sound of dry leaves crossing the graves of the dead under a harvest moon.
“Close you are to becoming what you will be?”
The student lays down the bread at his feet and stares about at the tombs. He considers the Master’s question and statement all in one. And he knows an answer is expected of him if the lesson is to continue. Perhaps that is the reason they have gone so deep into the tombs. A place the Master warned him, early on, to stay away from.
He looks around.
There are only two things that have a connection with all the things in this place, he thinks to himself. And so the answer must be one of those two things.
Death?
Or…
Kings?
He tries to remember why he has come here. But even that, in its own way, has lost meaning. He came here to do something. To set right some wrong. But the cruel lessons of the Master… and the power… have stripped such lies away.
He came only for the Power.
“I see only two things here, Master,” says the student. He waits to be struck, chastised… or for the lesson to continue.
“See what?” grumbles the Master, intent on his bread.
Once more the student stares about at the precinct of waiting, silent tombs, stretching off into the shadows in every direction for days at a time.
There are places within the temple where one can become lost forever. “Other” places from which one never returns.
“I see Death and Kings… Master.”
Silence.
And then…
“Fool,” mutters the Master, still intent on his dry and tasteless bread. “See only that which you want to. Fear that which you do not see.”
The student tenses his body and readies for action. To the casual observer, of which there are none, no change in posture would have been noticed—but the student is ready for battle. The mention of fear has warned him. He reaches out to sense menace or attack, and finds nothing.
Again the Master chuckles and continues on with his meal.
“Fear nothing always. And yet fear makes us strong once master it we do. Death… inevitable it has always been. Even for you. And for me. A king is everyone unto himself. Those who mastered their fears… this the Hall of the Kings is marked by.”
The Master lays down his bread and closes his eyes.
“Names are meaningless. But meaning… words have. A Kogon death giant was Xur, Warlord of Ten Thousand Worlds. All feared him. Terrible was he to behold. The mind, they say, shattered when one looked upon his insane visage. Slew him did Ilgon. Frightened he was. King he became. Fear he did master.”
All around them the temple begins to tremble. Dust and grit fall from the ceiling.
“Kogon menaced the Spiral Kings for ages untold.”
Nearby, one of the entrances to a tomb slowly slides away from its foundations, revealing a growing dark beyond.
“X’ao, X-unth, X-Um, and Xur. Among the Kogon giants these were. Others too. Conquered them the Spiral Kings did. Powerful they became. Fear they became. Power is fear.”
Now the Master is looking at the student with a malevolent gleam in his eye.
“Soon you will be ready. Fear must you conquer. Then you will know. Powerful you may yet still be.”
The student watches the darkness beyond the tomb the Master has opened. And it is not just darkness there that waits for him. It is cold. It is lost. It is death.
And so much worse.
“Afraid of what you… you will become,” chuckles the Master with no humor. “Enter the darkness and face your fears you will. Die or die not, then powerful you w
ill become, my student.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
At midnight, or as close as he could come to guessing what might pass for that hour, they stopped in the lee of a massive dune. Casper simply muttered “Patrol” and fell to his knees. He wrapped himself up in the jacket he’d put on as the night got colder, and he used the near-empty ruck as a pillow.
Urmo sat down in the sand near him. Cross-legged. Eyes closed. The moaning wind tossing sand into the creature’s fur. And Casper remembered something. He patted his leg where he’d strapped his knife, back before the giant monster had wrecked the ship. He only remembered that now, as sleep dragged him down and under.
The knife, too, was gone.
Most likely lost somewhere in the jungle.
***
Rechs, limping, led the rest of the soldiers forward. Casper was still standing on the platform of Stop Nine. Staring at the letters stamped into the wall.
Welcome to the Moirai Center for
Advanced Cognition.
Within all will be known.
Casper had been trying to hack some ancient operating system running on a console that seemed to be the administrative center for the platform. It was an old OS, so he had no problems getting around it and finding an admin back door. Unfortunately, the system merely tracked the access times the security locks on the doors had been opened, along with the encrypted passwords and associated usernames. All of them were weird.
windlooker
fategatherer
spiritmama
Typical Savages. He’d seen it before. When those massive ships left Earth in the bitter harvest of a thousand different dogmas colliding with each other head-on, they were each the embodiment of some singular philosophy that would prove them right in the vacuum. A fully contained world in which to experiment, refine, and perfect their ideal society. But every time the Terran Navy cracked a lighthugger, they went in to find not utopia found, but something much worse. Worse… yet still related to the original dream. Like some horrible doll with its head missing, replaced by something dead found along the highway.