Another growl off toward her side, like a caged leopard. Then, harsh voice, “We’ve got a mile of fucking rock on top of us, wanting to squash down, and you . . . ask . . . what’s . . . wrong.”
Oh. The claustrophobia.
Only way he knew to treat that, was get her out of here. He checked the buzzing ache in his teeth, found the Seal’s whine in front of them. Beyond the fireflies.
“We can back out, if you have to.” He glanced behind them, over his right shoulder, shadowy gray doorway in the gray stone. “The gate’s still there.”
Idiot thought, he wondered if she had pulled the door closed behind her as she came through. If they’d have to reach through that to turn the knob. The Finland door had closed itself . . .
“Where’s . . . the . . . Seal?”
“Ahead. I can feel it. Not close. Closer than it was.”
“Then . . . we . . . go . . . ahead.”
He glanced over at her, letting the fireflies go hang for a moment. Sweat glistened on her forehead. The flashlight, now, that was steady. Just like she’d held her arm steady while he cut the cast off her wrist. Even though she hadn’t trusted him.
“MOVE IT!”
He jumped, then snapped his gaze back to the fireflies, still glowing out there away from the light. “You have another flashlight in this pack?”
“WHY?” Stress apparently made her shout.
“I think we can herd those things ahead of us. Two lights, more force. Plus, I like backups. One burned-out bulb, we have a real problem.”
“Main . . . pack . . . left . . . side.”
He shed the pack, opened the flap, found another police-style metal flashlight, long and heavy, club as much as light, just like the one she held. That made sense—be able to swap parts between them if she had to. This one looked unused—the one in her hand had the black finish worn off to bare silvery metal in places, years or decades of use, a couple of fresh scrapes probably from his knocking it to the ground, back however many nights ago at the synagogue in a world beyond the gate. He pulled the spare out and closed and re-slung the pack.
“Help any if you close your eyes?”
“NOT A DAMN BIT!” Then he saw her swallow. Take a deep breath. “Sorry. I can still feel all that rock squeezing in on me, eyes closed or open.”
Another thought. “You have anything in the pack we could use to mark this gate? I wouldn’t be surprised if we find more of them. Or need to mark corners to find the right path back.”
“Fat crayon, upper right pocket. Lumber crayon, we use them when checking ruins in disaster areas. Flood, tornado, earthquake, whatever. You leave a mark—this building has been checked, three bodies, no survivors. That sort of thing. Marks on damn near any surface, won’t run in the rain.”
Apparently having problems to solve helped take her mind off the space squeezing in on her. It freed up her tongue, anyway. He dumped the pack again, found the orange crayon just where she’d said, marked the door with three quick strokes for an arrow, slung the pack again and tightened the waist-belt, sticking the crayon in his right jacket pocket.
Maybe he’d just marked an illusion, and the arrow would vanish as soon as they moved out of sight. He shrugged at the thought. If so, so. You do what you can, and move on.
“So. Forward the Light Brigade?”
He could feel her glaring at him. “I don’t much care for your choice of literary allusions. Go back to the Blessed Qur’an.”
“What? Just because the Noble Six Hundred got slaughtered?” Hey, if it got her mad, that helped. “How about, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.’ Shakespeare work any better for you?”
He sheathed his sword in the cane, freeing his left hand for the flashlight—the cane itself was a weapon and he’d just proven that it killed “fireflies”—then switched the flashlight on, aiming it low so he could still see the fireflies. They started forward at a slow walk. The bugs matched their pace, backward. So far, so good.
“I think Hamlet’s suicidal ‘To be or not to be’ depression fits us better. If I thought those things could actually kill me, rather than playing Prometheus on my liver . . . ”
Great. The whole reason I got involved in this was that I didn’t want to die just yet. Now I have to trust her to guard my back.
Then, a tangent thought, Could Legion actually kill a god? Was that all bluff? More illusions? I’ve just seen how real they can be.
Never trust a demon.
Meanwhile, literary criticism had moved them a few hundred feet down the tunnel. Lava tube. Whatever. It definitely felt like down, anyway. They walked a slow slope that varied less or greater, but always the one trend. Gravity had helped make this, whether with water or molten rock. More important, that meant they headed for some kind of exit. Water or rock, it had to flow somewhere to leave this empty space behind.
The fireflies continued their retreat from the light. They didn’t make any sound. Or, none that he could hear—he had no idea what she got from them. Or what her winds could hear. They didn’t find any branches in the tunnel, any other doors to confuse the route. No echoes from their boots thumping on the clean stone.
Just a tube burrowing through dark gray rock, wider and narrower and taller and shallower, with smooth ripples on the rough-smooth surface. The fog stayed constant, too, moist stagnant air. Now he smelled a taint of death in it, carrion, not heavy but enough to make him wish for another choice of route. He could understand why her winds weren’t happy.
“This fog has to come from somewhere.”
Apparently she was fighting her internal demons back. She was right—seamless stone, no cracks, no water on the “ground” under their feet. The chill air and stone wouldn’t create fog without a source of vapor.
He sniffed. Just water vapor and old meat and cold damp stone tickling his nose. No sulfur, no touch of swamp or even earth. The fireflies didn’t leave a trace behind them, either. He’d caught some char and bitter musty squashed-bug-smell from the ones they’d killed, but nothing since.
They weren’t retreating anymore. They’d stopped and spread out in a cloud across the roof of the cave, denser, as if they’d run up against a wall. But the flashlight beams just continued on—the light picked up bones on the cave floor beneath the glowing bugs. Lots of bones.
Ivory-white bones picked clean and then gnawed, until the bottom layer looked like dust and gravel. That explained the smell of death hanging in the dead air. Horned skulls topped the freshest layer, looked like goats or sheep. Some skulls that didn’t have horns.
They stopped moving down the tunnel. So did the fireflies. The orange dots packed closer together and milled about faster. They still kept the group-by-three going.
“Your winds say anything about that?”
“Which?”
“The fireflies. They won’t go farther. They crowd up against the ceiling, getting away from the light, but we’re at least ten feet closer than they used to let us get. Something stopped them.”
Her flashlight beam panned across the floor. “Something dumped a bunch of bones. I get the feeling those weren’t just bones when they arrived. Now we know what the fireflies live on when they can’t eat wandering gods.”
“Your winds?”
She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to voices only she could hear. Which was probably true.
“Moving air.” A sigh, audible tension flowing out of her. “Something slows it down, doesn’t stop it completely. Like a filter. Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why we can breathe here. Slow air exchange.”
Albert stared at the floating glows. “Can we get past it?”
“Don’t know. Depends on which way those bones came, before they were bones.”
He glanced behind them, sweeping his flashlight beam over the cave floor. Bare stone, not even dust. “You’d think, if they came down our way, we’d have found bits and pieces before this.” Then another, closer, look at the pile o
f bones. “I can’t see goats working their way through the doors. No thumbs.”
“Maybe those goat skulls were avatars of the Great God Pan. Or goat-headed demons. With hands.”
Pan didn’t have a goat skull, just horns. But thanks so much for the image. “If the . . . something . . . stopped bones completely, they’d pile up against an invisible wall. They don’t. They taper off, and the ones further down haven’t been chewed. As if the fireflies can’t go there, but anything falling off the pile can. I think I can see wool and dried meat, even.”
Which could explain why some body parts lasted long enough to rot before the floating piranhas ate it to dust . . . and he was shading the truth on wool. It looked more like hair, human hair. Hanging off a half-stripped human skull.
The fireflies had oozed forward a bit while his flashlight beam scanned their back-trail. They’d kept to the far wall of the cave, though, the part where he’d been aiming before. Maybe . . .
“Can we force them to one side and slip past them? They really don’t seem to like light.”
She played her beam down and up along one side of the cave and focused it tighter with a twist of her wrist into a sharp almost-laser-beam through the fog. The fireflies flowed away from each move, hugging the shadows.
“Don’t think we have much choice. Except for going back. The Seal still out in front of us?”
He checked the buzzing in his wisdom teeth. “Yes. As far as I can tell. Not any closer, yet.”
She answered him by pressing her back against the right side wall of the cave, her coveralls scraping along the rough stone as she inched forward. He pointed his flashlight at her feet and followed, the backpack forcing him further out from the . . . basalt? Granite? He wasn’t a geologist.
The fireflies packed tighter against the opposite side. They milled around faster. They flowed back toward the entry gate, away from their hoard of bones. And then they swarmed . . .
Fiery needles lit on his skin, his hand and face and side of his neck, any place they could reach flesh. He pushed along, slashing at them with his cane, bursting the glows into sparks, but more and more rushed at him, always in threes, replacing each kill with another trio, another trio squared, and the sparks from her slashes had just as little effect. She turned and backed over the pile of bones, inching out from the wall to leave space for him, and he felt like he was pushing into a feather bed, a wind, and the fireflies weren’t at his right side anymore, and he also turned his back to the pressure of whatever blocked them and shoved stumbling backwards until he thumped down hard on his ass and the things hovered beyond his face and he sat there staring at what was left of a human hand, gnawed down to sinew and bone and still clutching the pitted remnants of a femur in a death-grip.
Literally.
The wrist bones tapered to nothing. That probably marked the farthest limit the fireflies could push into whatever was stopping them.
He looked at his own hand. Blazing pain, five bites he could see, blood flowing and then ebbing and then stopping as his god-powers started to heal him. He touched the left side of his face and then his neck and his fingers came away with fresh blood there.
They didn’t seem to have gotten to his carotid.
When he ran the battle through his memory, they’d been concentrating there. They knew where humans and gods were weakest. He’d been guarding his neck and eyes and throat by instinct. To hell with low attacks, those wouldn’t kill him as fast.
He looked over at her. Blood on her forehead and cheek, her throat, but it wasn’t flowing. She was panting, shaking her head, staring back the way they’d come at the milling swarm of thwarted fireflies. She leaned against a door set in the center of the tunnel, steel in a steel wall.
The fireflies didn’t like steel.
He looked back the way they’d come, at the cloud of frustrated fireflies pushing at . . . whatever held them away from their next meal. The hand still lay there on his side of the barrier, what was left of the hand, bones held together by sinew and dried flesh, on the edge of the pile of bones and bone dust. He stared at it. That person had been alive in there, fighting, screaming, bleeding, dying, grabbing the only weapon he could find. A leg bone from a previous victim. He gagged at the visions.
He poked it with the tip of his steel cane, back through the barrier, back into range of the fireflies. They swarmed, covering it, glowing brighter as they fed, chewing it into fragments of bone as he watched.
He didn’t bother with the skulls—the human skull still with a hank of dark hair and dried flesh in the rictus grin of death, the goat skull with one horn gnawed down to the bony roots and the other still curling. Again, lines defining where the fireflies could reach.
XIV
He could smell animal, goat, in the air now, faint, not fresh, and a trace of dirt and rain and growing things—outside air. I hope that calms her claustrophobia a bit. Either that, or she included horse-tranquilizers and a dart gun in her emergency kit. I’m not much good for dealing with heavily-armed psychos.
She’d been hanging on the edge back there, he’d felt it. He glanced over, about to ask what her winds told her now, and she hushed him with a palm. She cocked her head to the door, listening. The blank door, no hardware on this side, just a slab of gray steel with a few streaks and patches of rust—he hoped it was rust—and a couple of suspicious scratches at one jamb where he’d expect to find a latch on a normal door. He glanced around. No light, except for their flashlights. No doorbell, no security peephole, no mailbox. They, whoever they were, didn’t expect the neighbors to come calling.
Looks like the fireflies are their guard dogs. Which have to be fed now and then, to keep them in fighting trim. That explained the goats. Not fed enough, though, have to keep the dogs hungry.
She nodded to herself, laid her flashlight on the stone, stood, and waved him to his feet and over to the right of the door. Taking command, officer and squad, which he preferred to her either freezing up or going all bear-shirt and chomping on the edge of her shield.
Then, just like at her apartment, she laid the palm of her left hand on the door. He heard clicks and clanks beyond the steel, and the door shifted a fraction of an inch, swinging away from them. She pushed, slow, gentle, eyeing the edge, knife at the ready. Light oozed through the widening crack. No alarms, no screams of rage or terror. She pushed the door further, flooding light into the tunnel. Still no reaction from the other side.
She nodded again, picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and stowed it somewhere inside her coveralls. Produced his sheath from the same place, sheathed the knife, and handed it to him. Reached back for her shotgun, shook her head, and pulled out her .45 automatic. Eased the door wide enough for her body, and slipped through.
He tucked his knife back into his jacket—it felt more comfortable there than in her hand. Wondered whether he should switch the cane for her police pistol, wondered whether he should stow his flashlight back in the pack, ran out of hands. Just kept on with cane and flashlight. Nobody was shooting yet, and he could drop either, damned fast.
Then he followed her through the door. Bright, after the tunnel, but not eye-squinty dazzling. They’d entered a hallway, what looked like poured concrete walls and ceiling, rough and unpainted. Doors marched down one side, tan-painted steel, with small barred grills and what looked like prison hardware on the corridor side. He’d seen the inside of jails now and then.
The other side of the hallway looked more like a couple of barn stalls with plain latches on grilled doors rather than locks. That’s where the smell of goat came from. His nose sorted out aromatic hay and feed and clean straw bedding, as well, and fresh water, and outside air from screened vents. Steel screens, in case the fireflies got loose. The jail-cell side didn’t give any good smells, hole-in-the-floor toilets and unwashed human bodies, days or weeks old, nobody in there now.
I’ve never met them and already I don’t think I want to. I can understand not wanting random strangers wandering in from
another world, but it sure as hell looks like they trained the fireflies to attack humans. Using live bait.
He revised his opinion of the people who ran this place. Downward. His nose said the cells didn’t have windows or running water or any food. Whoever ended up there—political prisoners, heretics, torture-murderers, rapists—got treated worse than sacrificial goats.
She had moved, faster than he had gotten through the door, about twenty feet down the hall, and stood like a statue next to another door, listening. Twenty feet. Two ten-foot stalls for the goats, four five-foot cells for the humans, barely enough room for cell doors. Ugly.
She waved him forward, still with a hushing finger in front of her lips. He stopped and dropped the pack with as little noise as possible and stowed the flashlight. She nodded. Pack on his back again, waist belt unbuckled in case he needed to dump it in a hurry.
He shifted the cane to his left hand and drew her pistol. She held up one finger, not her middle one so it wasn’t social commentary, hooked a thumb past the next door, and shook her head. He holstered the pistol again. Apparently her winds only found one heartbeat on the other side of the door, and she didn’t want any chance of him touching off a round through clumsy fumbling. Still not a lot of trust there.
We probably ought to work on signals, if we’re gonna spend much time hunting as a team.
She pointed to the wall beside her, then gestured that he should go to the right immediately when she opened the door. And, left hand on the door . . .
The locks clicked and she banged the door open, no stealth this time, through the door and he followed. She had moved fast, fast as the wind.
A little stupid there, not adding two and two and ending up with four. Wind goddess, moves fast . . .
A shocked guard with a bleary wide-eyed stare sat behind a scratched metal desk, leaning back in his steel swivel chair because the muzzle of her pistol pressed into his forehead. Albert had time to take in the scene. Plain painted concrete walls with high barred windows, steel screens again, and file cabinets and a couple-three blank doors to one side and one out the front, all steel, couple of chairs, a coat rack. Magazine lying open on the desk, not dropped or flung, only visible thing inside the room beside him that might serve as food for the fireflies, looked like maybe he’d been sleeping on the job.
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