Palaces of Light

by James Axler

  And yet there was something about the architecture of the buildings opposite, the way in which they gleamed so highly in the sun, as though polished. The shapes were slightly off-kilter where they had been slotted into the gaps in the canyon wall. Their lines were straight, yet at oblique angles that seemed to make them loom out of the canyon even as they seemed to be secluded. The strange little windows and oddly out-of-proportion doorways seemed to give them a perspective that made them seem almost alive. Certainly, they didn’t look like the architecture of any race that he could recall.

  If there was an outside intelligence of some kind at work here—and why should it not be supposed, for it would not affect the fact that they would still have to fight the physical foot soldiers of such a force—then what was its aim? Why did it require so many people to do its bidding? And why, also, did it require so many of them to be so young?

  There was something ominous about many of the tasks that they undertook, particularly the way in which they were constructing a kind of platform out on the lip of the ledge, in the center of the buildings. It was makeshift, and yet made with such care as to suggest a very definite purpose.

  Doc was interrupted in his train of thought by the arrival of Jak to take his place. Unlike Mildred, Doc kept his own counsel. As highly as he thought of the albino youth, he was far too prosaic a character to listen to Doc’s notions without the likes of Krysty to act as a bridge between Doc’s world and the one that Jak inhabited.

  In the same way, the things that caught Jak’s attention were very different to those that had absorbed Doc during his spell on watch.

  Jak hunkered down and began to watch and absorb. His own highly developed senses—not mutie, but refined to a point that almost made him one with the fauna—began to tune in with the immediate world. The first thing it told him was that the area was almost certainly devoid of life apart from that which lived on the opposite ledge. Normally, the scents of any animals and birds, even those that may be nocturnal and so hidden away at this time of day, would begin to seep into his nostrils, his acute hunting instincts delineating them one from another. But here there was little to sort and identify, a few creatures that resembled rats, if the scent was anything to go by…and these were sparse. They lived on the meager grasses and the insect life that hovered around them. He guessed that the main source for maintaining the ratlike creatures was the detritus left by the people who lived in the shining houses. A grim flicker of amusement strayed across Jak’s face as he considered what a finely balanced ecosystem existed on the ledge and in the canyon. By the smell of old food that was an undertone in the scents that drifted through the air, the rodents formed a staple part of the people’s diets, roasted and stewed.

  The people had to live on grasses and berries gathered from the floor of the canyon, the rodents they caught, and any supplies that they could take from passing convoys or villes they raided for their young. Jak knew that partly because he could smell that there was little other wildlife, and there was no scent of oats or wheat. But partly because he hadn’t seen any riders leave the ville to go hunting, nor had he seen anyone leave to farm. There was also no sign of where anything was being cultivated, nor any indication of an area within view that could support any kind of agriculture.

  Where Doc had dwelt on the idea of what might be powering the people of the shining city—an outside malign influence or their own belief in their power and possibility—Jak wasn’t concerned with anything like that. He watched how the people moved and went about their business in a very different way.

  They didn’t move with any natural grace. Even the most unfit of the older people would still have a certain fluidity to their movements if they were in any way unimpeded. But they didn’t. There was a certain jerk and tension to their movements that made them move as though they were marionettes on strings. Where Doc would deem this as being the sign of an outside hand, Jak looked at it differently. He had seen such movements before, particularly in animals that he had been hunting. There was a certain type of berry that, when eaten in any quantity, caused the muscles to jerk uncontrollably. Paralysis followed soon after, with a chilling at the inevitable conclusion. That was in small animals. Perhaps the men of the ledge city knew to avoid the berries, but they might have eaten rodents that had taken less care. Jak had seen villes where the poison of the berries had decimated the population when unwittingly eaten by the people through the meat they caught. Perhaps it was this. Perhaps it was something else.

  Like Doc, Jak had been thinking of ritual, though his take on it differed from the old man’s. Jak had seen villes where the baron had tried to rule with the idea of magic and some kind of power from beyond the physical realm. Maybe that was what these people believed in. Jak thought it was crap, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they believed it, and they used berries and herbs to cloud their minds and reach states that they would call visions of the truth, and Jak would call simply dreams. And stupe ones, at that. Not that it mattered. All that mattered was that they would use these herbs and berries, and they would cause the same physical effects where they remained in the body. They would be slow and jerky. Easier to fight, then.

  But that was the older ones. The younger ones—those who had been taken—moved in a very different way. Sure, they had a touch of the jerkiness that came from the ingestion—deliberate or otherwise—of the berries. But there was something else: they had a sluggish torpor to the way they moved, as though they were sleepwalkers, or their limbs were weighted down with rocks. No—sleepwalkers, that was more like it. They walked like they were asleep, or in trance, under the influence of hypnosis. It was a rare art in these post skydark days, but it wasn’t unknown. He had seen it happen, and learned of how it worked from Mildred and Doc. They wouldn’t, perhaps, see it as he would. They knew how it worked, but didn’t have the closeness of observation.

  So the young would be sluggish, but by the same token, they would do whatever was asked of them unquestioningly. Which made them, perhaps, the greater danger of the two groups.

  He was still pondering this as the sun crept across the center of the sky, and Krysty came from the coolness of the cave to relieve him. He said nothing as he left his place to go back to the darkened interior, deciding to keep his thoughts to himself. There would be time enough to talk of these things later, when they compared their findings before deciding on a course of action.

  As he neared the resting group, he was glad that he had opted not to speak, as the low sound of Mildred’s voice grew distinct enough to make out words.

  “And I knew that it meant something to me. It’s just that it was so buried under all the shit that’s happened that I’d forgotten about it, as though it happened to someone else. I wouldn’t have recognized the land around here from all those years ago, but I doubt if anyone would. The mysterious palaces of Mancos Canyon, though—”

  “That is where we are?” Doc interjected.

  “Hey, you tell me where else I could find buildings like those right in the middle of a canyon,” she answered wryly. “The Mesa Verde Park… Jeez, I remember that there were a lot of stories about those buildings. Some said that they were from the Native Americans, and others that they came from a time before that, when there were other races that roamed across the continent. Some said they were like the Mayans and Aztecs of the South Americas, and they had the same kinds of ideas about the sun and their other gods. There was only one way to make them happy, and that involved a lot of bloodshed and killing.

  “Now some of that may be true, or all of it, or none of it. But it felt like the bit about the killing was right. This place looked amazing from a distance, but as soon as we went into Mancos Canyon, we could feel something. The air changed.”

  * * *

  IF KRYSTY COULD HAVE HEARD what Mildred was saying at that moment—if it had been something more than a distant drone—then she would
have agreed. For on her watch, she was witnessing something that made her blood run cold. Not just the act, but the manner in which it was performed, caused her sentient hair to curl closer to her scalp and crawl in tendrils around her neck.

  It happened so gradually—perhaps even before she had come to the watch—that she didn’t at first notice any change. The people on the ledge opposite ceased the tasks that had been occupying them for most of the morning. Now that the sun had crawled over the halfway point in the sky, it was as though they had been called to some kind of order. Gradually, they finished the tasks that they had been performing and began to move toward the area where the platform on the lip of the ledge had been constructed. They gathered around in a silent, milling throng, so that it seemed that everyone poured out from the palaces and onto the narrow strip of rock, jostling for a better position.

  Just as it seemed that the platform was to be obscured by those around it, a pathway opened up, and an immensely fat man in a dusty coat and a stovepipe hat moved through the crowd, leading a tall, thin and blond young man by the hand. Even from where she stood, Krysty could see that the young man was almost stumbling over his own feet such was the trancelike torpor in which he seemed to exist. He wandered to the platform, watched intently by the crowd. There was something almost overwhelming about the silence, reaching out to her across the divide.

  Guided by the hand of the fat man, the youth climbed onto the platform and lay on his back, almost falling over the edge as he stumbled on his way up. His complicity in being led into such a position was perhaps what Krysty found the most disturbing. She could see what was going to happen, so why couldn’t he? And if he could, then what possessed him to be so compliant?

  The fat man turned and began to talk to the crowd. Perhaps talk wasn’t really the right word. He began a strange singsong chant, the syllables drifting across the gap between the two sides of the canyon making no sense. Maybe it was a foreign language, or maybe it was just the way in which he intoned the words that made the high, keening sound so incomprehensible on one level and yet so bone-chillingly understandable on another.

  After finishing the chant, the fat man turned to loom over the platform, pulling a knife from somewhere within his dusty coat. There was an almost audible intake of breath from the gathered crowd—or was it, Krysty wondered, from herself?—as he lifted the knife above his head before plunging it down and into the breastbone of the blond youth. Eerily, the young man made no sound as the knife carved easily through his flesh, pausing only to stick on bone or cartilage before the fat man forced it onward with a grunt.

  Although Krysty couldn’t really have seen it in as much detail as her mind told her—not at such a distance—she could have sworn she saw the fat man reach into the chest cavity, pulling it open before plunging his fist in to grasp the beating heart, which he held above him, blood dripping down his arm and glistening in the sun, before thrusting the organ into his mouth while the crowd yelled a brief and yet oddly intense approval, which died away with an echo across the canyon.

  “Fireblast! What kind of crazed bastards are these people?”

  Krysty was so wrapped up in what was happening in front of her that she caught her breath in shock as she heard Ryan whispering at her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, lover,” he said softly, “we’re over here. Stay frosty.”

  “But what kind of coldheart weirdos are they that they can do that?” she said equally softly, shaking her head. “And what was that language the fat bastard was speaking?”

  Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know. Mebbe it’s some kind of ancient tongue that goes back to when those buildings were made.” He outlined for her briefly the memories that Mildred had shared with them while Krysty had been on watch.

  When he had finished, she was nodding. “Yeah, some of that figures, I guess. Thing is, I can’t work out why it’s so important for them to gather together so many kids. It looks like they’ve been all over the Deathlands taking them. Why would they want to do that?”

  Ryan snorted. “I have no bastard idea. Mebbe they sacrifice them every day like that poor kid.”

  Krysty pondered that. “Could be. They don’t seem to look at it as anything other than a usual thing. Look at them now,” she added, pointing across the divide. Ryan followed her gaze, and could see that even in the short time they had been talking the crowd had dispersed. The corpse had been taken away to be disposed of, and the platform had been perfunctorily washed down. Now, as everyone appeared to be going about their everyday business as before, lost in their routines, it was as though the dramatic gesture of a few minutes before had never happened.

  “Can’t be, though,” she said on reflection. “They’d be slaughtering a shitload of kids, sure, but they wouldn’t need as many as they’ve got there. There’s something else, and we need to work out what it is.”

  ‘Why?” Ryan asked.

  Krysty looked at him. There was something in the earnestness of her gaze that chilled him to the bone as she said, “Because if we don’t, then we won’t know exactly what those bastards could do. And we need to know exactly what we’re going up against if we’re going to get Baron K’s kids back. Mebbe free the others before they buy the farm.”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah, guess you’re right. Get back there and get some rest. We’ll talk about it together when the sun goes down. Meantime, me and J.B. can sit out here the rest of the day.”

  When she had gone, Ryan sat and thought about what Krysty had said while he watched the people on the ledge opposite go about the rest of the day as though nothing untoward had occurred—mebbe for them it hadn’t, he thought—in their ritualistic, almost hypnotic manner. The more he thought about it, the more he wished he could get inside their heads in some way, find what made them tick… That had always been one of the things that had given him an edge. And yet here he felt like he was blundering in the dark.

  When J.B. joined him, the two men sat in silence for some time, watching the remains of the day ebb away. It was J.B. who finally broke the silence.

  “Look at that,” he said simply. But Ryan was ahead of him. Where the platform had been constructed, there was now an empty space. They had watched it being torn down and the pieces taken away without thinking much about it. But now, as the area became clear of debris, it was apparent that the space wasn’t as empty as it had at first seemed. For in the area that had lain beneath the platform there was a circle constructed in the ground. It had been ringed around in rock, with a pattern running across it that—unless Ryan was mistaken—formed what he recognized as either a pentacle or pentagram. He knew of these from old predark books he had seen as a youth at Front Royal, and although he was unsure of which of the two it may be, he knew that either of them spelled trouble.

  Now, as the final task of the day, the people of the mysterious palaces laid kindling and brush on the circle, laying it over with layers of wood that they then covered with a tarp to protect from the elements.

  Ryan realized that the ritual slaughter earlier had been less of a regular event than a kind of dedication ceremony. They were building some kind of ritual beacon—for what end he couldn’t comprehend—and the seeming ease with which the slaughter had been received had more to do with its purpose than its frequency.

  That could only mean that whatever the circle and beacon were for, it was an event fast approaching.

  They had to move soon, or risk losing all.

  Chapter Eight

  When K looked back, there was no way that he could understand how it had happened. More than that, he had no notion of how it could have gone on for so long.

  Or did it? The whole thing could have taken days, months, years, perhaps. It had the unreal sense of time that happened with dreams. How long had those coldhearts actually been in the ville? If he thought about it in one way, it seemed as though they ha
d always been there. It was hard to remember a time before they had arrived, even though their arrival was etched into his memory. And yet the whole thing, while seeming to go on forever, had been over in the blink of an eye. It had to have been the way in which those bastards were able to mess with their minds.

  That was his only consolation when he thought about his daughter. Amy was gone now, maybe never to return. Her mother was nothing to him. Chilled, long since, because she was nothing more than a pain in his ass. But Amy…

  If it could be said that anyone had a redeeming feature, no matter how black and cold their heart, then the way that K felt about Amy was ample proof of this. He would do anything to get her back. And he would have, too. Despite the fear he felt about the way in which he had been so easily bested, and the men who had been able to achieve this, he would still have gladly charged into battle to win her back.

  It was Morgan who had caused him to think better of that. The outlanders had gifts; the old man was able to see that. They would be a vanguard, who would either return with the children or blaze a path that would define the task ahead of a second wave.

  Or something like that. But while he was waiting, all K had was the idea that he was letting Amy down. He should be the one going after his daughter, and not leaving it to strangers. He was pretty sure that there was an undercurrent of feeling within the ville that felt that way, too. He was their leader, and he should be leading the charge to get the children back. Sure, no one had actually said anything. If nothing else, they were too smart—or scared or both. But the feeling was there. It would rumble deep beneath the surface, maybe to build in pressure until it broke the surface like a steam geyser, scalding the shit out of anyone who got in the way. So he had to make sure that it didn’t burst. Lance the boil and get the pus of discontent out. The best way to do that would be to get the kids back. And the best way to do that would be to find out where they had been taken, and then follow up on the mercies that he had sent to do the job. If they came back with the kids, then that was fine. If they didn’t, then he had the backup plan—his own men, traveling a good distance at the rear of the six-strong assault party. They were to watch, wait, observe. If they had the chance, get the kids back and take the credit. If not, then act as an advance warning of the return. Grab the glory for the baron. He had the balls to do it, but the sense—for his people, of course—not to risk his own when there were others who could do the dirty work.