by Jack Conner
“We’re not fools, Doctor. The Collossum visiting the Great Temple in Xlatleb has already retrieved the Codex.”
He blinked. “Then why are we here?”
“The Collossum went out after the Codex with a large number of his priests and warriors. Many died, or, according to the reports they sent in on the return journey, went mad in the pre-human city they found the Codex in. But on their return to Xlatleb they were attacked. The city’s in chaos and it was some time before the priesthood at the Temple realized it fully, but the Collossum—and the Codex—have vanished.”
“Gods.” Avery looked from Sheridan to Risiglon. “So that’s why we’re here—to find the missing god, as well as the Codex.” To Risiglon, he said, “So what’s your role?”
“Advisor on Xlacan customs and translating their language,” the anthropologist said.
“Is that all?”
Risiglon hunched his shoulders uncomfortably. “Well, I really shouldn’t ... ”
He stopped when they rounded a bend to see the soldier who’d gone ahead halted dead in the middle of the tunnel, gazing stupidly at something in the wall. The group came forward to look, peering into the glacial ice.
At first all Avery saw was frost and ice cracks, but then he perceived what the soldier had, and smiled. Before them, encased in ice, was a Carathid, one of the great insects who had once dominated the planet. This one was bigger than a cement truck and looked something like a beetle, horned and iridescent. It seemed to glow in the illumination of their flashlights, its scarlet wings winking, its great curving horns glinting, and some trick of the Atomic ice gave the impression that the creature moved, just slightly, as if it the Carathid still flew through prehistoric skies, perhaps about to alight on some lumbering prey-bug.
“Amazing things, aren’t they?” said Risiglon. “Did you know, they evolved more than one strain of intelligent life.”
“I know of one,” Avery said, and shared a look with Sheridan. He was gratified when she sort of smiled.
“I helped excavate a ruin a few years ago,” Risiglon went on. “This was far out at sea, on an island Octung had just begun to occupy. The soldiers laughed. So many refugees had come from the mainland to escape the war, and here they fell right into our hands. They stopped laughing when some rebels located the ruins of the Carathid people—we never knew their name. Rebels found ancient weapons and were able to use them against us. I led a journey into the heart of the island, to a distant archeological site, but I couldn’t unlock its secrets fast enough. The rebels drove us out, every man and woman of us. I remember a few months later hearing that our fleet had returned to the island, intending to punish the rebels and reoccupy it, but every single one of them was dead.”
“Dead?” echoed the soldier who had stopped to gaze at the Carathid.
Risiglon’s jaw set grimly. “I don’t know if it was some weapon that turned against them, or some prehistoric disease, or some creature they were able to unleash that turned on them, something buried for millions of years in an underground vault beneath one of the ruins, but whatever it was ended their rebellion.”
“You never found out?” Avery asked.
“Would you? Our soldiers got out of there as fast as they could and declared the island off-limits for the duration of the war. I heard later some general ordered it carpet-bombed.”
“Good riddance,” Sheridan said, then noticed the second soldier bringing up the rear. “We’ve dallied long enough.”
“Sheridan,” Avery started, then corrected himself. “Colonel. About what we were discussing—”
She speared him with a look. The warmth had gone out of her eyes. “You know all you need to know, Doctor. Let’s all get going.”
After several hours of hiking through the winding tunnels, coming to cross-tunnels and navigating around rifts, Sheridan allowed them to rest a few hours. “We should be almost through the glacier,” she said. “I’d hoped to reach rock before we set up camp, but it looks like we’ll have to sleep on ice.”
They had brought gear with them in case this became necessary, and so they rolled out sleeping bags and heated some bread and meat over a little portable stove. It amazed Avery the little luxuries the Octunggen allowed themselves, even here. Theirs truly was a technologically superior race. Ghenisan soldiers would be eating dried foodstuffs and consider themselves lucky if it didn’t have worms. Had the R’loth been responsible for the portable heaters, as with so many of the Octunggen’s advancements? He doubted it. Once again he was confronted with the fact that there was a reason the R’loth had chosen the Octunggen as their Chosen People.
Avery busied himself by checking the contents of his pack, specifically in making sure his medical kit had been undamaged by the fight with the whale. It was fine. The Octunggen had been good enough to lend him a new kit, and he had determined to be the expedition’s medical appointment since he had no other official duties and the Octunggen captain in charge of the Valanca had refused to give him one. Despite Sheridan vouching for him, they still weren’t sure if he was an enemy or not, but they could always use a doctor.
After dinner, the group stretched out in their separate sleeping bags and settled in to sleep. Sheridan took first watch. Avery waited till the others fell to drowsing, then turned to see her smoking a cigar and staring down the hall, dutifully on guard against attack. He’d half expected her to be watching him and cursed himself for a fool. She was not that sort of woman.
He heard a voice, so quiet he almost couldn’t place it, but of course it was her.
“I can feel you watching me, Doctor.”
Half smiling, he slipped from his sleeping bag and approached her. “You can call me Francis now, Jess.”
“It’s Colonel, Doctor.”
“Jess, please—” He’d started to reach a hand out toward her shoulder, but drew it back when she turned to glance at him. Her face was as hard as the ice around them.
“It’s Colonel.”
He cleared his throat. I really am a fool. “Of course,” he said. Was it the colonel I kissed awhile ago, or the woman? Gods, does SHE even know? “I was just thinking—”
“I know what you were thinking. Go to bed.”
“—thinking that we could share the watch. It would be sort of ... romantic.”
She didn’t laugh. She had turned away from the small light that lit the sleeping area, and her face was completely in shadow save for the small red flare cast by the cigar.
“We’re on a mission of vital importance to the world,” she said. “It is not a fucking honeymoon.”
Honeymoon? Where had that come from?
“I didn’t say anything about—never mind,” he said. “I just wanted—oh, fuck it. Good night, Sheridan.”
You just killed a man for me, he thought as he retreated. A man who could have actually been useful to you. You valued me over someone critical to the mission. Now this.
She didn’t reply as he slipped back beneath the blankets. For a long time he lay there, trying to quell his overactive mind. It had been two weeks since he’d left Ghenisa with her, two weeks since the apparent—but only apparent—victory of his friends and allies over the Starfish. In that time he and Sheridan had shared adjoining cabins aboard the Valanca, an Octunggen zeppelin, and had taken full advantage of their proximity. But he still didn’t know her. In her own way, she was just as inscrutable as Layanna.
His mind turned to his friends in Ghenisa, not just Layanna but Janx and Hildra, as well. He hoped they were restarting their lives in fine fashion. Were they celebrated as the heroes they were? Did they enjoy parades in their honor? He hoped so. He missed them. Most of all, though, he wondered about Ani. Was she settling in with her new family? How were they treating her—still with that odd mixture of respect and fear? What was she to them? What did her dreams mean, and her powers?
It took him a long time to get to sleep, not just because of his jumpy mind but also because of the cold. Ghenisa was a land that received snow
in the winter, and cold gusts that came down from the mountains, but it was generally a temperate place for the most of the year, and he was ill-suited for the arctic. His balls had contracted so tightly into his body that he didn’t know if they’d ever reemerge, but gradually, as his body heat enveloped his sleeping bag, they did, his gooseflesh unprickled, and he relaxed enough to drift off. Eventually dreams took him.
He awoke to Sheridan sliding into his bag beside him. She was naked. Shocked, he said, “But—I thought—”
She kissed him.
“My shift ended,” she said.
He almost laughed. Was it that simple? Now that her duty was done, she was a woman again? Gods, he would never understand her.
“Then whose shift is it?” he said. “I don’t want someone to hear—”
“It’s yours.”
He felt himself deflate. “Then ... should I ...?” He made half-hearted motions to climb from the bag.
Her hand ran down between his legs, further warming those parts of himself that had just come back to life.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
* * *
Refracted sunlight lit the caverns to some extent in the morning, and the members of the group enjoyed the brighter surrounds as they dug into breakfast, even enjoying a small cup of coffee each—save Risiglon, who preferred tea, sadly unavailable; the man carrying it had been killed. Afterward, they set out again, and long hours passed. Avery’s legs ached, but Sheridan allowed the group to stop only infrequently. They passed that night in the caves. They’d reached the rock caverns by then, the corridors of the mountain. The glacial tunnels had drifted and sunken a bit compared to their counterparts in the rock, but the rock halls were thankfully still accessible, and the members of the group all appreciated the warmer confines. It was good to be out of the ice.
They found occasional bones in the mountain passages, and Risiglon, familiar with arctic threats as well as customs, warned of the predatory seals and large white-furred batkin that might make their lairs here. Several times they smelled the musk of some animal, and all were on their guard, especially that night, but they never encountered whatever had collected those bones, some of which had been human. Avery was not disappointed.
It was late in the next day when they came upon Xlatleb, one of the crown jewels of the Xlacan Nation.
Chapter 2
Dark was just settling in as Avery arrived at the mouth of the cave and beheld the city for the first time. He sucked in his breath at the sight. Spires of ice rose toward the black heavens, each spire aglow, some with green light, some with pink, blue, red or more exotic hues. The Xlacans, without recourse to wood, had learned to manipulate ice to astonishing degrees. Boring holes through glaciers with sonic technology was just the start of it. Avery had known Atomic ice possessed strange properties, but he was amazed that the Xlacans had learned how to take advantage of them; the ice that comprised their skyscrapers and domes had been coerced to glow in beautiful and fantastic colors so that the whole city bathed in the soft illumination. Whole districts were given to a single color, while others delighted in variety.
“Ah,” said Risiglon, smiling. “We have good timing. The towers only light up at night.”
Gunfire echoed up from the city, belying its dream-like appearance, and a feeling of dread began to settle on Avery. Just what are we walking into? He knew little of what was going on throughout Xlaca, only that after the firing of the Device the nation was going through some turmoil as the natives attempted to oust their Octunggen occupiers.
“Come on,” Sheridan said. “Let’s go down.”
Rearing mountains surrounded Xlatleb on two sides, the sea to a third (where many ships gathered, most invisible in the darkness—the pirate blockade), and an icy waste stretched to the north; Avery was glad the mountains blocked much of the wind as the group passed down through the foothills and into the city, which not only abutted the highlands but in places was set into them. Avery couldn’t tell if the icy buildings had been carved out of some glacier that had once lain across this area or if the Xlacans had erected their city in some other way, but in any case almost every building was composed of what looked like a single block of ice. In some regions of the city, the ice had melted over time, or the land had shifted, and much of the ice was frosted by innumerable cracks. The Xlacans had in many cases simply filled the fissures in with water so that they’d frozen over again. The result was that many of the structures leaned or sagged in strange lumpen heaps, and soon Avery began to realize that he could tell if he was passing through a wealthy area or an impoverished one by whether the buildings had been repaired in this water-method or simply rebuilt when they’d begun to wilt too much.
A great number of the buildings that weren’t rearing towers and small residences were high domes, thick-walled and mostly featureless, strong bastions against the weather. Many encompassed entire city blocks or even more than one.
“They build them like this as proof against the weather,” said Risiglon, as if Avery hadn’t figured this out. “Inside will be apartments and shops—little miniature townships. That way the natives don’t have to go out into the cold when they’re going about their daily lives—although some do, of course. But many spend most of their lives inside the block-domes or in the tunnels underneath. That’s why there’s so few people about. Many get from building to building underground ... although of course there will be less of that these days.”
Natives that chose to brave the hostile elements shot the group queer looks, the majority giving them a wide berth, at least in the outskirts. Not all, though. At one point a gang of youths approached, bearing small arms and blunt instruments and shouting in Xlacan, but the two Octunggen soldiers brandished their submachine guns and the youths slunk away.
Avery saw no cars, though several times a fur-clad shape lashed a team of wolves or dogs down an avenue from the back of a dog-sled. One of these carried a small pile of dead bodies on the back. Gunfire rattled nearby, and fur-covered figures moved swiftly through the streets. Someone screamed, then was quickly silenced. Desperation gripped the city almost palpably.
Sheridan led her group through the shadows near the unlit buildings, pressing deeper into the troubled metropolis. At one point she halted them under the shelter of a shop-front while a troop of armed men shuffled past, shouting to each other and firing intermittently overhead.
“It’s worse than I feared,” said Risiglon.
“Tell me,” Avery said. As a somewhat rancorous aside to Sheridan, he said, “I wasn’t included in the main briefing.”
She didn’t deign to respond. Busy studying the street to ensure no other packs were swarming after the first one, she said, “Professor, why don’t you enlighten the doctor?”
Visibly summoning his courage, Risiglon said, “Octung conquered Xlaca early in the war—as we discussed, for its oil deposits. Well, most Xlacans are generationally infected—what you Ghenisans call ngvandi—and in ancient times one of their larger tribes worshipped the R’loth. The gods of the sea. The R’loth instituted their faith on many islands and coastal communities, turning the people of the sea into their worshippers.”
“Yes,” Avery said. “I remember a cult of R’loth worshippers in the Azad Islands. That was before ... well.” His mind flashed back to the Starfish leveling the Azad capital, and he shuddered.
Risiglon grimaced. “This worship included human sacrifice and other rituals, of course, which incurred the fear of the other tribes, who in one combined assault wiped them out, or most of them. It sent the worship of the R’loth underground. Still, when Octung occupied the country it found some of the locals already converted to their faith.”
“Convenient.”
“We thought so. The Octunggen brought the cultists into the light again. They became the priests of the new state religion of Xlaca: Collossumism. Many of the main population, seeing that their fellows had been practicing the faith for hundreds of years—that it wasn’t, in that
way, being forced upon them, but was natural—converted willingly. When the so-called Device was activated and a great number of natives—those who hadn’t converted—rose against the occupying power, the converted Xlacans fought for Octung, not against it. This has led to civil war throughout the country, including Xlatleb. A religious war. The converts versus the rebels. Door-to-door fighting, different districts and block-domes belonging to different sides. Very nasty. Each block-dome is like an armed fortress now.”
“Segrul’s navy came to bring aid to our side,” Sheridan said, still staring out at the street, “but the revolutionaries of the city control the ports—and the port defenses. Now the pirates blockade the waters but can’t lay foot ashore without great loss.” She glanced back to Avery, her face grim. “If I give the order, via radio, they’ll attack, irrespective of casualties, to give us the cover to do what we need to. Understood?”
Avery nodded, feeling faint. “So now what?”
“Now we reach the Temple, where the Collossum will hopefully have reappeared with the Codex. We get it, take it and him through town back to the caves, and only then, when the Codex is secure, do we summon Segrul. If we're not in the city, he'll be free to use his more devastating weapons and won't incur so much loss when he attacks. At any rate, then we fly away in the zeppelin.”
“So we’re not just here to retrieve the Codex, but the god, too?”
“Yes.”
“Plus you’re still carrying out Octung’s agenda: trying to conquer Xlaca.”
“We are an Octunggen force.”
“I’m not comfortable with that,” Avery said.
Ignoring this, she returned her attention to the street. Seeing that it was clear of armed parties for the moment, she left cover and set out once more. The small group followed, snapping their heads at every least sound. Snow blew thicker down from the mountains, and Avery felt it settle on his lips and melt in his mustache. He felt like one big solid block of ice. Armed forts or not, he would love to slip inside one of the block-domes and get warm, preferably over a nice strong drink.