by Various
In one cavern a firestorm of shrapnel and smoke burst from some hidden alcove among the stalactites, reacting to the unblinking red eye of a motion sensor embedded in one wall. Some of the adolescents lurked at the room’s entrance, dividing their terrified glances between the rising water behind and that glaring ruby light, choosing who would live and who would die. Others rushed by, ducking and dodging. Their flesh and bone was dissolved in the resulting whirlwind of metal, screams ripped away in a rush of smoke and dust. A few – those who neither hesitated nor rushed – made it through.
In one chamber the ground gave way to an echoing chasm lined by splintered bones. Only by leaping across then scrabbling amid the jagged handholds of the opposite rock face could the youths pass. The screams of those who fell, punctuated by the splintering cracks of impact, echoed throughout the hollow mountain forever.
And always the water rose, dogging at their heels, curling its tendrils, wrapping everything in a sulphurous haze. The mountain filled from the base upwards, and with every step the remaining air grew hotter and more stifling.
Ica, muscles protesting, passed obstacle after obstacle, forever convinced that each test would be the last. Only by accepting his own death could he march across scorching coal fragments. Only by understanding he was nothing could he amble unhurriedly past an unflickering motion sensor. Only by knowing that he was dying one second at a time, that he was already dead and forgotten, that nothing he had ever done would be remembered, could he hurl himself into the abyss, then clamber, hands and arms lacerated, to his feet.
He was surviving and he didn’t care.
And all the time, driven on like some unstoppable dervish, Dalus was one step ahead; turning back to watch Ica but never rushing to his aid when he faltered. Their clothes hung in shreds, their skin was a patchwork of scrapes and cuts. Once Dalus had turned to Ica, eyes burning, and said: ‘Try to keep up, brother…’
And then they passed through the final cavern and entered a tunnel that twisted and grew narrower, coiling slowly downwards. Ica, palms and knees shredded, struggled to keep sight of his brother’s retreating form.
‘Dalus?’ he panted. ‘T-the water, it’ll…’
‘I know,’ came the curt reply. ‘It’ll come down after us.’
The tunnel grew steeper, walls closing in until the brothers writhed, wormlike, using only toes and elbows. How many youths remained behind them Ica didn’t know. He couldn’t turn his head, even if there were light. He was blind, a maggot within a mountain.
The ghost of a scream filtered along the corkscrew tunnel: a million kilometres away. Somewhere far above scalding water lapped at the edge of the descending shaft, waiting…
Ica could see it happening, in his mind. The water – at first only a few droplets – would ebb its way over the lip of the cavern. As it rose the trickle became a stream, then a river, then a tsunami that tumbled down through the passageway, growing faster and faster as the walls grew closer, roaring in sulphurous fury.
And then there was light. Hurting Ica’s eyes, making him wince. And there was Dalus, worming his way from the tunnel, shredded legs kicking as he exited.
And the mountain shook as the waterspout filled up, and all around the air began to rush by, driven on by the wall of liquid rage charging at his heels.
And the sun didn’t look sweet when he saw it, and he felt no relief at the freshness of the air. He was still dead. Still forgotten.
Only two other youths clambered from the tunnel behind them, faces pale and eyes ringed as if they had been existing underground for years.
They stood on a ledge, jutting from a sheer rockface on the mountainside, and the ground fell away in all directions. The distant ocean was a pond of ripples from this height. And beyond, with sides so sheer that even the craghawks could find no nesting spots, was the Ghostmountain: the tallest of all the Razorpeaks, its very existence a toothy, snarled challenge to the clouds.
Ica stared at it and murmured, ‘Emperor preserve…’ Its enormity compacted his misery, reminded him of his scale. You are nothing, he told himself. You are nothing and in a moment you will die, punched from this ledge by a fist of water. Maybe your bones will shatter at the impact, driving shards of ivory into your brain. Maybe you’ll die quickly. Or maybe you’ll be cannoned out into the air, screaming as the water burns your skin and your eyes dissolve. Maybe you’ll plummet, arms thrashing, to the fanged rocks at the base of the mountain.
Maybe you’ll die in pain. Maybe you won’t.
But you’ll die. It’s so certain that you’ll die, you might as well already be dead.
And look, there’s nowhere left to go. Nowhere left to run.
And the mountain shook, and the water roared, and Ica remembered.
His mother, screaming as the storm hit and the roof of the hut separated like a jigsaw, trying to wrench open the cellar door to seek sanctuary. She buried her fingernails in the rotten wood of the strut support as behind her the walls of the house went convex and shredded like paper.
‘Look,’ grunted Dalus curtly, returning Ica to reality. He pointed towards a tangled shape at the farthest corner of the ledge.
A twisted morsel of canvas, stretched to near-tautness by a metal frame, protruded like a shark-fin. Other components – rusted spring mounts and ragged tail rudders, decaying tensile pins and mangled harness struts – lurked within the heap.
‘Gliders…’ Ica mumbled numbly. Behind him the mountain growled.
And the voice in his head whispered: So you can go on.
Might as well.
Nothing to lose.
Dalus was already beside the pile, snatching at the decaying apparatus, selecting the best glider kit. He hefted the concertina stretch wings onto his back and began buckling the harness around his chest, eyes glowering in determination. Ica, legs ready to collapse beneath the despair filling his mind, simply reached out a hand and dragged at whatever random assemblage it touched. The wings hung shredded and near useless, the harness little more than crossed bandoliers of pleated chamack-twine.
Doesn’t matter. Put it on.
The mountain bellowed, a bull-roar of fury. The air rushing from the tunnel mouth became a physical force, pushing the twins backwards towards the edge. One of the other youths lunged for the pile of gliders, eyes wide. The final survivor simply stood and stared, waiting.
Then the world was thrown on its head.
Kultoom tribe died. Kultoom Island shredded like an almost dead body, thrashing itself uselessly, flailing at its tormentor and struggling to hold in its own viscera.
The storm closed with hungry malevolence; anonymous and implacable.
The universe, with no more regard than a man might have for an insect beneath his boot, reached out and expunged a population.
With a cockroach snap the wind unfurled the tattered wings of Ica’s glider and threw him across the distant ocean. From the corner of his madly oscillating view he registered the mountainside erupting in a gargantuan waterspout, cascading downwards in sheets of rainbow-infested spray – but it was distant, unimportant. A scream dwindled on the howling wind.
Then it was all gone: obliterated in a dizzying split second, and when reality coalesced Ica was gliding erratically, stranded within a gulf of air. The breath, sucked from his lungs, returned in heaving gasps, his head pounding with the angry rhythm of his pulse. Nearby, fighting for stability, Dalus swooped past, stretch wings fully extended. Petulant turbulence buffeted Ica and he over tilted, tumbling briefly in a flurry of mangled wings and tail blades. The descent flattened into an awkward, crippled equilibrium, doomed to fail before long.
The third youth, who had snatched at the pile of gliders moments before the water thundered from the tunnel, cried out nearby. Ica’s gaze darted sideways to see the ragged collection of components he’d selected parting like crumbling earth, fragmenting in a cloud of wafting fabrics and spinning shards of metal. The small shape at its epicentre, arms flailing uselessly, tumbled away towar
ds the ocean. He screamed all the way.
Dalus’s trajectory levelled out, once again in front of Ica, and he turned to deliver another infuriating grin, sunken eyes twinkling in – what? Triumph?
Then both twins stared forwards, driven on by the furious gales ripping between the razorpeak summits. To fly into the wind was impossible, retaining balance and altitude was the only recourse. So, bloodied and scarred, exhausted physically and mentally, the twins were silent as before them the Ghostmountain loomed closer.
Afterwards, the world was black. Not the dull, dry blackness of a firestorm or some other act of violence, but rather the polished blackness of sea-slippery rock. The very earth had been torn apart, cleaved up from the rocks below like a scalp from a skull. And yes, there was debris, but not much: no devastated huts or mangled vehicles, but rather scattered patches of dust that might once have been homes, or the splattered bloodspray of liquid metal, melted and hurled away by vicious lighting.
Ica and Dalus crawled from the cellar that had become their burrow, and stared at all that was left of their lives.
On the first day, and even the second, there was no real pain. The despair had yet to descend and instead they wandered the pulverised island in a fugue.
On the third day the reality began to crystallise. They would cry occasionally, though somehow never enough to satisfy the hidden despair. The need to express, to vent, went unresolved. They could not bear to look at one another, nor speak.
On the fourth day, when hunger began to cramp their stomachs, the numbness began to return. They would find some distraction or task – some beleaguered seabird or semi-successful fishing attempt – and all would seem normal, until the mind allowed itself to wander and the memory of… of events returned. And every time the pain would return: an endless loop of remembrance and reaction.
On the fifth day the glider came.
‘Every male of age thirteen to be present at Table City upon the thirteenth day of the thirteenth lunar month of every year. By Imperial command.’
It almost passed over, sighting from its aerial vantage nothing but the wasted remains of a community: a tribe reduced to a naked rocky crag by the tempest whims of an unstable world.
But Dalus flashed light from a jagged shard of mirror at the distant wraith, and it began the long spiralling descent that would bring it to the last survivors of Kultoom Island.
And they went aboard to die.
Twice Ica’s stretch wings hissed as fabric tore, and twice he found himself lurching impossibly to the left or right, preparing for the terminal descent to the waves below.
Twice the voice in his mind said, Yes – let me die! And twice he righted himself, somehow finding the stability to continue. The Ghostmountain no longer loomed across the horizon of the world. This close, it was the world.
‘Where will we land, brother?’ Ica called ahead to where Dalus effortlessly hung aloft. His brother didn’t reply. Ica called out again, louder this time, ‘I said, ‘where wi–’
‘I heard.’ Dalus looked back, piercing his twin with a stare. ‘And how should I know?’ Then he adjusted his shoulders, dipped forward and streaked ahead.
At times the wind seemed to reach underneath Ica, a seemingly gentle hand to cradle his exposed form, only to hurl him high into the air, or drop away from underneath, leaving him tumbling and helpless. At such moments only fatalistic momentum – the certainty that it made no difference whether one went on or gave in – allowed him to struggle against the pockets and troughs of resistance to stay level.
Every second brought him closer to the Ghostmountain until it seemed to become a planet, tumbling across the horizon of Gathis, to inevitably collide, showering all of existence in chaotic planetary viscera and arterial lava. Ica found himself wishing it would, that he could ride the crest of that fiery cataclysm and burn out in the air, an insignificant spark.
In his abstract state he barely felt the fingers of power that once more delved into his mind. He could barely summon the energy to retch, gagging uselessly at the psychic contact. The voice of Librarian Thryn entered his brain again, stabbing at the back of his eyeballs.
‘There…’ it hissed, and unbidden his eyes swivelled to a craggy rockface, where – if he winced against the stinging air and focused – he could make out a shadowy recess above a flat ledge. Another cave. Ahead he could see Dalus reacting similarly, face turning to the distant platform.
So the twins tilted their exhausted, ruined bodies towards the ledge, and clumsily, awkwardly, descended.
The stone felt like a bed of feathers, welcoming and cushioning Ica’s tumbling form. In some distant part of his brain he was aware of the ruinous landing, vaguely noting the spreading pain but unable to wince or groan.
Dalus was already on his feet, of course. He cast off his stretch wings in a blur, then clenched his fists and punched the air in triumph.
‘First!’ he called out to the mountain, spinning to stare at his panting brother with eyes full of madness. ‘I beat you!’
Ica stammered, uncertain. ‘W-what?’
‘I beat you. I came first.’ Dalus’s grin extended further still, an ugly gash in his sallow, pale features. ‘Now we’ll die, b-but it won’t matter because... because when we do you’ll know I’m best, and the world will know I came first, and, and–’ The grin became something else – a grimace of pain and rage which bubbled up from his eyes and sent tears streaking across his face until his voice cracked and he couldn’t continue. Ica stared, astonished and terrified at his twin’s tantrum, unable to understand. For the first time since he could remember Dalus looked like a child – shredded and exhausted by a hateful world – but a child nonetheless, with all the petulance and pettiness a child should command.
Then the wind seemed to be rushing directly down upon their heads: a warm gale that grew hotter and hotter. Ica tilted his tired neck and there, descending on a mantle of smoke and superheated air, was Librarian Thryn. Like a pair of shimmering wings unfurling from his colossal shoulders, twin streams of heat diminished slowly until his massive feet crunched upon the rocks and his metallic form settled.
‘Survivors…’ he said, sunken eyes drinking in their features. ‘Survivors who are dead, and yet live. Hm. Have a care with feelings of relief, young ones. You’ll die yet.’
Ica struggled against the energy filling his brain, twisting his groans of exhaustion into words. ‘W-why? Why do these things to us?’
Thryn smiled, psychic hood crackling. ‘Let us see…’ he hissed.
And the energies reached out and infiltrated the twins’ minds, and they saw–
Ica’s mind was a mountainside. A descending slope of anguish that neither levelled off nor ended abruptly in a chasm of fatalism. It rushed onwards, descending too far into misery to ever consider turning about and rescaling, yet too steep and unbroken to ever reach its suicidal conclusion.
Ica’s own life was worth nothing to him.
To go on, unfeeling and uncaring, was just as easy as giving up.
Librarian Thryn smiled to himself.
Dalus’s mind was a minefield of bitterness and pain.
In every challenge, in every task, there was judgement. There was his father’s attention, grudgingly given and rarely complimentary. There was his mother’s love, distant and awkward.
And there was Ica. Ica, his father’s favourite. Ica, to whom his mother cried out before her death. Ica who was loved and spoilt. Ica who could do no wrong. Ica who was an hour older than he. Ica who would inherit their father’s chamack. Ica who, by dint of sixty Emperor-damned minutes, mattered.
Dalus’s own life was worth nothing to him. All that mattered was outdoing his brother, coming first, finally demonstrating to his parents – far too late – that he the younger brother, he the runt, he the scorned and unloved and uncared for, that he was the better!
To go on, raging and jealous and desperate for attention, was far easier than giving up.
Librarian Thryn frowned.
>
When reality returned, the wind howled like a child. Ica opened his eyes to a world refracted by tears and Thryn’s mournful voice filling his mind.
‘All of creation suffers, young ones. Only in accepting our own mortality can we… make a difference. Only in bearing the burden of our failures can we find the strength to go on. Only in detachment from glory, or honour, or jealousy... from life itself can we hope to spare others from grief.
‘We are Doom Eagles. And we are already dead.’
A silver gauntlet raised to point at Ica, the extended digit filling his world.
‘You may enter, young one. Enter and discover the Eyrie of the Doom Eagles. Enter in humble and thankful service of the Golden Throne. But remember: you have not survived, this day. You are dead now. Never forget.’
And Ica stood, numbly. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered. The wind screamed, almost tearing him away into the abyss, and he staggered, step by step, into the gloom of the cave. Behind him, he knew, Librarian Thryn followed, his hulking frame stalking gracefully into the welcoming shadows beyond.
And he didn’t look back, but he could hear the blast door closing, shutting out the rain. He could hear the wind, growing stronger by the second. And he could hear his brother, sobbing gently. Moments before the blast door closed, moments before Ica’s life as a peasant of Gathis ended and his non-life as a Doom Eagle began, he heard his twin cry out to the empty, aching universe:
‘But I came first! It’s not fair!’
And Ica said to himself: No, it’s not fair. It’s life.
The Ghostmountain sealed with a thump, and the twins, each in their own way, died.
ANCIENT HISTORY
Andy Chambers
Cross the stars and fight for glory
But ’ware the heaven’s wrath.
Take yer salt and hear a shipman’s story.
Listen to tales of the gulf,
Of stars that sing and worlds what lie
Beyond the ghosts of the rim.