Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road (v1) [rtf]

by Emily

  Above the esplanade, gray metal flashed in the sunlight.

  Another disk.

  It looked remarkably like the one at the Devil's Eye, except that this one was secured to a mount instead of lying on its side. It was pointed almost in her direction. Like that other one, it was concave, a shallow bowl; and also like that other one, it was on a rooftop. It was, she thought, an exquisite piece of statuary. Her gaze passed on.

  The corridor creaked and rocked and the horses watched her with frightened eyes, and one or another of them occasion­ally pulled back. They were, she judged, less frightened by the-sheer altitude than by the sense of unstable ground. Behind her, Silas was having trouble with a piebald. The animal kept trying to get loose, and Silas was constantly stopping to reas­sure it and stroke its muzzle.

  It took all her courage to continue walking when she reached the point where the mesh had fallen away and noth­ing lay between her and the void. Her stomach curled into a knot and she concentrated on thinking about Quait, looking out toward the horizon (but never down), and wondering what Raney was doing. Enjoy the rolling hills and tangled for­est, she told herself. You'll never get a better view, an interior voice cackled maliciously. The far side of the broken bridge dangled cable and I-beams and crushed struts. Beyond, the roadway descended to the riverbank, took on its ground cover of earth and shrubbery, and dived into the forest. She could follow it green and straight to the limits of vision.

  A cloud drifted across the face of the sun. Upstream, the river was dotted with small islands. She could make out the remnants of old harbor works, piles marching side by side into the water, broken buildings, an engine of monumental propor­tions that might have been used to lift bulky objects. She could not relax, and when a sudden burst of wind hit her and pushed her toward the edge, she dropped to her knees in near panic.

  "You okay, Chaka?" asked Silas, behind her.

  "Yes," she said. "I'm fine."

  Then the mesh was back and it felt like a tunnel. She relaxed a little until the security fell away again. This time she needed stronger medicine, and imagined herself swimming naked with Quait. Or with that young Oriki who had danced for her. The latter image, despite her situation, brought a smile. Was there anything more ridiculous than a nude male on a tabletop? Still-It helped.

  Below, the river flowed to the horizon.

  No real effort was made at conversation. They were loo far

  from each other, and even people walking side by side would have been hard-pressed to talk against the wind. Nevertheless, Silas called to her to stop until he could catch up. 'Look at that," he said. He was pointing at the disk. ..;

  "I saw it." She had to shout.

  "There's one of those at the Devil's Eye."

  "1 know." ......

  "What do you think they are?"

  She would have shrugged except that they were out in the open again and she didn't want to perform any unnecessary movements. "Don't know." She edged forward, eager to keep moving.

  "I wonder if it's strictly artistic. Or if there is some other kind of significance?"

  "I don't know, Silas."

  "Hey!" called Flojian. "What's the hold-up?"

  "Hold your horses," shouted Silas. He turned and grinned at Chaka, then opened his journal. The wind riffled the pages. "I'm going to make a sketch," he told her. And, to Flojian, "It'll only take a minute." He was trying to hold the book open and find a pencil when the pieblad yanked him off his feet. He bounced off a strip of mesh, which was all that kept him from going over the side.

  "Damn," squealed Chaka. "Look out."

  He hung on to the journal, which threatened to blow off the walkway, tightened his grip on the horses, and got back up. He looked embarrassed rather than frightened.

  "You okay?" asked Chaka.

  "I'm fine." He shook his head at the piebald. "Tonight, I think we should have this one for dinner." But his attention went right back to the disk. "When we get down there," he added, "we ought to make a detour and take a closer look at that thing."

  And there it was. Let's go see the dragon. Maybe if we're lucky it'll come back.

  "Meantime," she urged, "let's keep moving."

  She passed the last of the protective mesh as she approached the south tower. It was polished and gray and soared hundreds of feet over her head. A massive fracture divided it from top to bottom. Directly ahead, Avila moved cau­tiously along the open walkway. She wore her hood up against the wind. Once, she turned and waved.

  Get across this last long stretch, get to the north tower, and the rest looked easy.

  Chaka glanced at her horses. They seemed okay. Nervous, but okay.

  The wind lifted the walkway.

  Now Silas was in the open.

  Behind him, Flojian and Shannon prudently waited, decid­ing that six people and seventeen horses might be too much for this part of the walkway.

  Silas drifted back now and then to deal with his animals. One, a chestnut gray, seemed particularly tense. It was second in line behind the piebald. "No problem," he called forward to Chaka when the commotion caused her to turn and watch. After he got the creature moving again, he spared her an encouraging smile. As if she were one of the horses.

  Now, Chaka was experiencing some resistance on the part of one of her own animals. Reluctantly, she went back, squeez­ing past Piper, to talk to it. If one of them starts any funny business, she warned herself, let it go. Don't get involved in a pushing match up here.

  She spared a word for Piper too, and they were moving again. But almost immediately she heard a shout behind her. She turned in time to see Silas staggering toward the outside edge, his journal clutched in one hand, while the piebald backed and reared off the walkway.

  It bellowed and scrambled for purchase. But it was too late, and Silas reflexively made the mistake of trying to hold the reins, so he was dragged off his feet and over the side as she watched in horror. He would have been gone had not the other two animals dug in their heels. The piebald's reins were ripped out of his hands and the horse began the long fall to the river.

  Chaka scrambled back past her horses. Silas was dangling from the walkway, the reins twisted around his wrist. She threw herself face down on the concrete. He looked up at her,

  his face a while mask. She seized his jacket with both hands. "Hang on." she cried.

  Bul he was loo heavy; she could find no purchase, no way to hold him. There were cries and footsteps behind her, but it was all happening too fast. She screamed for help and he was slipping away and she was sliding forward, looking down at Silas and the river.

  "The disk!" he cried.

  "I've got you!" But she didn't: She was being dragged over the edge and he was sliding out of her grasp. Where were they?

  His eyes were very blue and very frightened. He looked at her in those last seconds, as someone finally grabbed her ankle and told her to hang on.

  "Damn!" said Silas. And then he was gone.

  She screamed. He seemed only to float away from her, and then strong hands pulled her back from the brink. Afterward, she cried for a long time.

  14

  "It was something about the disk," Flojian said. "He got excited about it for some reason and he startled the animals." But they saw nothing unusual, even when Chaka observed that Silas's last act had been to call her attention to the structure.

  His journal had fallen onto the walkway, and in the end it was all they could find of him. The scope of a determined search for his body would have been so vast, and their resources were so limited, that they saw little chance of suc­cess. And so they restricted themselves to a nominal hunt along the northern shoreline.

  Avila spoke for everyone when she pointed out that Silas would have wanted them to move on, to establish his memo­rial at the end of the trek. So they said farewell to his spirit in a late-afternoon ceremony, engraved the Tasselay on his marker, broke out one of the wineskins, and drank to him.

  To Silas Glote, last of the Roadmakers.r />
  They climbed a hill to get a better view of the disk to which Silas had drawn their attention. But it was hard to see why he'd got excited. The object seemed quite unremarkable. After a while they gave it up, and turned again to the north, somber, dispirited, and anxious to be away before dark.

  "But I don't think we're going to get very far," said Shan­non, pointing to a set of cuttings on twin cottonwoods. They designated a left turn along the riverbank. Toward the esplanade. And the disk.

  Reluctantly, they moved out across the ridge, through the dwindling green light. Squirrels gamboled through the leafy overhang, and birds sang. Ancient walls rose around them, brick and stone houses lost among the trees, a post light

  crowded out by an elm tree and leaning at a forty-five degree angle, a hall-buried hojjy with a gray tassel hanging from a rusted mirror.

  The day was unseasonably warm. Some flowering plants had already bloomed. These were unlike anything Chaka had seen before, with big, yellow, bowl-shaped flowers. "They're fireglobes," said Avila. "We had some at the sanctuary."

  The disk was mounted on the roof of a three-story brick building overlooking the esplanade. The front door was miss­ing. Interior walls had crumbled. A mummified desk lay on their left, submerged in clay. "Careful," said Shannon, as Chaka tested the floor.

  "Feels okay," she said.

  She crunched through to the back of the building, with Shannon in tow, and found a stairway. Shannon put his weight on it, climbed one floor, and pronounced it safe. Moments later they stepped out onto the roof.

  The disk was bowl-shaped, and looked as if it weighed six hundred pounds. It was mounted on a circular platform and held in place by a thick, U-shaped brace. The interior of the bowl was ribbed, and a series of handholds were bolted to the brace. The open portion of the bowl was raised toward the sky, pointing almost directly up.

  "Holy One," breathed Chaka.

  Shannon looked at her, startled. "What?"

  "I see what Silas meant. It's moved."

  Shannon rolled his eyes and measured the bowl with a glance. "I don't think so," he said. He put his shoulder against the lower rim, and pushed. Nothing happened. "Nobody's going to move that."

  But the bowl was no longer aimed in the general direction of the bridge.

  They continued along the slope on foot and emerged at last into the esplanade, where the inkala had come to rest.

  The shelf was flat and grassy. The soil was worn away in spots and they could see concrete. They could look down at the

  river, blue and cool in the westering sun. Their campsite of the previous night was visible. There was the hilltop on which they'd crouched, watching the inkala come in, and there the trail over to the bridge.

  A trench several feet wide and a couple of feet deep ran the length of the esplanade, dividing the concrete.

  "What do you think?" asked Chaka.

  "It's a scenic location," said Flojian. "It would have been a place for people to come in good weather. If you poked around, you'd probably find some tables and chairs."

  Quait looked at the sky. "Not good," he said. "It's getting late. I don't think we want to be here after dark."

  Everyone agreed with the sentiment, and they spread out, looking for Shay's markers. Avila found something else.

  Twenty yards into the forest on the far side, a green strip rose out of the ground to a height of about two feet. It was on a line with the trench, and it quickly acquired an outside rail and curved off north by northwest, following the corridor of the inkala. It looked like the green strip that had run parallel with the walkway across the bridge.

  They found a similar construction on the eastern side of the shelf, also aimed directly down the middle of the trench.

  "I suspect if we followed it back to the bridge," said Quait, 'it'd turn out to be a continuous piece."

  "But what is it?" asked Flojian.

  They were still puzzling over it when Shannon showed them a sassafras tree on the edge of the esplanade. A cross was cut into it.

  "What's it mean?" asked Flojian.

  "Don't know," said Shannon. "But I think it's one of Shay's marks."

  "You don't know?" Flojian looked incredulous. "Isn't there some sort of code of the woods in effect here? Don't you peo­ple all speak the same language?"

  Shannon sighed and turned to Avila. "It's supposed to tell us something, but I'm not sure what."

  Chaka pointed across the trench. "Another one," she said. The same mark, cut on a red oak near the too of the ridge.

  Shannon took off his hat, looked first one way and then another. There were two more, at the eastern and western ends of the shelf. "I'll tell you what it suggests to me, but it makes no sense. It's a box. Under different circumstances, I'd think it's telling us this is journey's end."

  They glanced uneasily at one another.

  "So what do we do now?" asked Quait.

  The question was directed more or less at Avila, as if she had replaced Silas. She looked up and down the platform. The sun was on the horizon, and the sky was turning red. "Jon," she said, "are you sure those are the same signs we've been fol­lowing?"

  He shook his head. "It looks like the same knife. And all the marks we've seen have been made by a little guy. I'd guess Shay was about five-five."

  "That's about right," said Flojian.

  "How did you know?" asked Avila.

  "The marks are usually centered at just over five feet. Eye level."

  "Maybe," Flojian said, "we should debate this later. Right now, I think we ought to get away from here. No matter what our little buddy says. It's getting dark."

  Shannon and Quait looked at Avila.

  "We don't really have anyplace else to go, so I don't see much sense in leaving."

  "But the place is haunted," said Chaka.

  Avila had been wearing an old fabric cap over her hair. She removed it, wiped her brow, and looked out over the river. "We don't know what's going on here," she said. "And I guess we have to find out. I'm going to stay and see if anything hap­pens. Anybody who wants to stay with me is welcome. Any­body who doesn't want to hang around, I don't blame." Her voice sounded strained.

  Only Flojian had the courage to leave. "You're going to get yourselves killed," he said. "I hope you know that." He took one of the packhorses, added some grain to its supplies, and without another word marched off down the trail toward the bridge.

  A hall-hour later, he was hack, explaining that he could not abandon his friends. Maybe. Chaka thought he had found being alone even more frightening than the potential reappearancc of the apparition.

  They led the horses onto the far side of the ridge. Then they made dinner, hut they all just picked at their food.

  It was dark when they finished. They put out the fire, checked their weapons, returned to the top of the ridge, and took up positions along an area that overlooked the esplanade. Hod they been expecting a human enemy, they would have spread out. But they stayed together, hidden in a cluster of rocks and bushes.

  Flojian sat down next to Avila. "I've heard," he said, "that demons won't accost a priest. Is there a chance that people traveling with a priest are also safe?"

  "By all means," she said quietly. "Have no fear."

  Chaka was not comfortable at the sight of Flojian stumbling around in the dark with a loaded rifle, but there was no help for it. Avila, whom Chaka knew to be a competent marksman, didn't bother with a weapon. "Whatever it is," she told Chaka, "I don't think a rifle will be useful. If we need weapons against it. I doubt that we have the right ones."

  They no longer enjoyed the panoramic view to the north­west that they'd had from the opposite side of the river. Now, iheir view restricted by trees, their warning that an unearthly visitor was approaching would be very short. "This is a scary business," Chaka admitted to Quait.

  "I know." He stayed close to her. "We've got plenty of fire power up here. If we need it." His own breathing was uneven. "Boo," he added.

  They bo
th tried to laugh, but the sound died on the wind.

  "Best keep it down," warned Shannon.

  "You okay?" That was Flojian, on Chaka's other side. His hands were trembling. Somehow that was more reassuring than Quail's false bravado.

  "Yes," she said. "I'm line."

  "I'm sorry about Silas."

  As is usually the case with the death of someone close, Chaka had not yet come to terms with the loss. She kept expecting him to appear, to walk out of the woods with his journal in his hand. She was surprised that Flojian had noticed she'd been hit hard. "Thanks," she said.

  "He'd have been proud of us. Staying, I mean. It's not what I wanted to do, but it's what he would have done."

  She listened to the forest noises. Quait got up and walked along the top of the ridge, trying to see.

  Shannon moved past her, knelt down beside Avila. "Do you believe demons exist?" he asked.

  She made a sound deep in her throat. Then: "I don't know, Jon. Before yesterday, I'd have said no. Now I just don't know."

  Quait came back. "Nothing yet," he said. He looked at the stars. "It was about this time last night."

  They fell silent. Chaka wondered if there wasn't a charm that might help. If there was, Avila would certainly know about it. Might even have it. Probably she did, but wasn't saying anything because she didn't want to encourage people thinking about spooks. It had been, after all, her suggestion that they stay, and she surely would not put them all at risk if she had no defense.

  "If we don't attract its attention," Flojian was saying to no one in particular, "we might be okay."

  Chaka aimed her weapon at the platform. She had a clear shot, if need be. "What's the doctrinal position on demons?" she asked Avila.

  "According to the Temple," Avila said, "they do exist. But they act indirectly. They're responsible for all kinds of evils. Ill­ness. Flood. Sometimes they fire human emotions and drive us to oppose the will of the gods."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "I'm not sure what 1 believe anymore. Ask me in the morn­ing." She turned and looked west into the trees.