by Conner, Jack
Something troubled him: Sheridan. Not them being caught together (though that too, oh yes), but the fact of her apparent camaraderie. Now that they were free and Layanna was unable to exert her other-self, Sheridan could very likely kill her with a conventional bullet. Sheridan should at least be trying. Perhaps Avery had misjudged her motives. Or perhaps she was just waiting for ... something.
Their feet touched ground, and they all flexed their arms, rolled their shoulders, and worked cramps from their hands. Thorns in the vines had cut Avery’s fingers and palms in several places to go with the scrapes he’d gotten climbing the tree last night—what seemed like years ago—and he thought something may have given him a rash on his cheek.
Noises sprang from the right.
Dreading what he would see, Avery looked. He wished he hadn’t. A wall of Infested was just then rounding the bend of the palace. The elephant his group had ridden in on strode at the horde’s forefront. No Infested rode it, but others rode giant worms and lizards to either side of it. As soon as the group saw the horde, the horde saw them.
“Damn,” said Janx.
The elephant barreled straight for them.
Sheridan fired at its head, to no effect. Avery could feel the thunder of its coming through vibrations in the ground.
“Run,” Layanna said.
They pelted across the lane and into the forest of pillars holding up a section of the neighboring building’s roof.
The elephant charged, weaving in and out of the great pillars, which were spaced widely enough to accommodate it but close enough to slow it down. Not enough, though. The thing was fast. The overmind pushing it on drove it mercilessly, and when Avery looked briefly over his shoulder he saw the great, lumbering corpse barreling down on him, its flesh rippling with maggots in places, in others hanging off in discolored sheets. Real maggots, not those of the Colony, writhed in sores along its sides, and it stank like an open grave.
Its trunk, long and grasping, snaked toward Avery, the slowest runner, and it too squirmed with tiny white shapes. With a scream on his lips, he ran faster.
The others rounded a bend ahead of him and made for a ruined building. Partially collapsed, many cracks showed in its sides, and the group threw themselves into the deepest-looking hole, perhaps hoping it went all the way through and would admit them into the interior of the structure. Avery piled in after them, finding himself in darkness trapped in a shallow nook.
Outside, the elephant trumpeted.
Its trunk thrust through the opening and grasped at the nearest person—Hildra. She slashed it with her hook and edged backward, but the hole they were in didn’t go far enough for her to outdistance it. The trunk crushed her against the wall, then, getting a feel for her dimensions, curled itself around her middle. The others beat at it, and Janx fired into the beast’s skull.
Heedless, it lifted Hildra screaming off the floor, began to drag her out—
Layanna laid her hand on the trunk (Avery wincing as her bare flesh touched it), and the air blurred, just briefly. The elephant shrieked, dropped Hildra, and staggered back, taking its trunk with it. Hildra slapped at her shirt, knocking off any maggots, then stomped the ground with her boot heels.
“Fuck fuck fuck!”
“What did you do?” Avery asked Layanna.
“Usurped its master’s control—for a moment.”
“Can you do it for longer?”
“I—don’t know.”
He studied the others. It was dark in here, but there was just enough light spilling in to see his own desperation reflected back at him. The Infested had found them. There was no way they could reach the Dome with the whole city boiling after them, and that was if they could even get out of this damned nook without getting trampled.
“Can you control it long enough for us to ride it to the Dome?” Avery asked.
A panting, shocked silence followed.
Slowly, Layanna nodded. “Maybe. I couldn’t control a person, but an animal, already dead and used to being controlled ...”
“Do it,” said Sheridan.
Hildra shot her a glare. “I think we should take those grenades of yours, ace.”
“Try it.”
They stared at each other. Outside, the elephant trumpeted, and in the near distance came the sound of shuffling feet: the horde had rounded the bend.
“Let’s hurry this up, folks,” Janx said.
They emerged from the crack. Layanna exerted some psychic force and the elephant stilled, then, almost surprisingly, knelt. Nonplussed, the others climbed into its litter once again, where they were safe from the maggots that squirmed along the creature’s back, and Layanna followed, just as the horde arrived.
The elephant stomped down. It crushed one Infested creature, then another. Sheridan fired, shooting out one’s brains, and Janx and Hildra opened up, too, targeting first those who carried guns. Maggoty hands grasped at the bands holding the litter.
With Layanna driving the elephant, the beast plowed a path through the horde, knocking the Infested aside or grinding them to paste, and at last pulled free, barreling down the main street toward the great black dome in the heart of the city. The rhythmic jounce of the elephant’s tread jarred Avery’s spine, and the litter swayed dangerously, threatening to break and slide off. It hadn’t been designed for such use. Avery held on tight, willing them on.
Trumpeting sounded to the left. His head whipped around to see another elephant, this one under Infested control, coming from down a side passage. Then another from the opposite direction.
Hordes of Infested streamed just behind the beasts, some riding animals, some afoot. Some fired at the rogue elephant and its riders, but the distance and movement made the shots go wild. The enemy elephants gained ground, and shapes took position in their litters. Guns flashed.
A bullet whizzed past Avery’s ear, punching a hole in the red silk wall of the litter and causing the wall to dance. He crouched, making himself as small a target as possible, while Janx, Sheridan and Hildra returned fire.
Layanna made their elephant veer left down a side passage, then turn right at the next avenue, swinging back toward the Dome, as the maggot titan had referred to it. The maneuver kept them out of the enemy’s line of sight for a minute, and at last the Dome loomed ahead, great and black and alien. For the first time, Avery realized that no vines grew on it. No vegetation of any kind. And yet the flowers came from here, the shoots running, apparently, under the wall. And inside somewhere ... the Key ...
The Dome approached, but slowly, and once again Avery had to adjust his estimate of how big it was. It reminded him of coming on a mountain, always nearing but ever far, huge beyond a human’s ability to predict scale and distance. For the first time he saw that slender towers, so small as to be almost insignificant against its vastness, rose from each of the five archways, and that the surface of the Dome was multifaceted, like a diamond. Just what was the structure? Why did the giants’ city surround it?
“Almost out of bullets,” Janx said.
“Me, too,” said Hildra.
They slapped in their last rounds. The enemy snipers seemed to have run low on bullets, as well, or had run completely out, as they’d stopped firing.
Only five roads led to the Dome, Avery saw, each running from one of the city’s great buildings. This one, like all the others, reached a grand door fully two hundred feet high, sealed completely shut. It was from the top of these doorways that the towers arose. Layanna stopped the elephant before the door, had the animal kneel, and the group climbed gratefully down. She started to direct the elephant at the pursuers, but Sheridan stopped her.
“Send it away and it could come back under their control,” she said. “Have it lay down and we can use it for cover.”
With a frown, Layanna complied, then turned her attention to the door. There was no lock, no keyhole, just a smooth black surface built by inhuman appendages in some age long ago, baked in energies that permitted no natural growth an
d even impeded Layanna’s ability to bring over her other-self.
“Maybe they won’t attack,” Janx said, taking position behind the prostrate elephant. “I mean, they wanted us to come here, right? At least you, blondie. Now that they’ve—”
A bullet whined through the air, striking the wall not five feet from the top of Layanna’s head—as close as the sniper could come with the elephant blocking the way—and ricocheting with a spark.
“Think again,” Hildra said.
Sheridan crouched and took aim, and so did they. When no further shots came, and their enemies weren’t much nearer, they continued to wait.
Avery studied the door, then Layanna. “Well?” he said.
“I don’t know. I think it will open for me—”
“Good.”
“—but I don’t know what we’ll find on the other side.”
Swallowing, he glanced back toward the approaching elephants. The horde of Infested on the ground had almost reached them.
“I think we’d better risk it,” he said.
“Then stand back.”
She laid her palm against the door, and he could feel something vibrate and ripple around her, much more powerful than the small force she’d exerted on the elephant, and, with a great roar of metal or stone or diamond or something else altogether—Avery had no idea what the Dome was composed of—the great door slid aside, revealing a huge gaping rectangle of blackness.
Back on the road, the horde of Infested stopped their forward progress, as if in awe. They, or their controllers, may have been waiting hundreds, even thousands of years for this one moment. Then, slowly, they began to come forward again.
Avery and the others stepped through.
With a hollow boom, the door sealed shut behind them.
Chapter 2
A spike of claustrophobia stabbed Avery between the shoulder blades. We’re trapped.
“Anyone have a light?” said Hildra.
“Not me,” Janx said.
“I don’t think we’ll need one,” said Layanna. “Wait.”
After a moment, the air began to glow, just softly, the illumination—a sort of violet—coming from no specific source and only revealing the area immediately around them. They stood encased in an eerie violet fog. Sounds reached them—scratching. Wailing. Thumping. The horde had reached the Dome. Howling, denied a glimpse of the promised holy act, whatever that might be, they expended their fury on the structure’s wall. Object of worship or not, it bore the brunt of their rage now. To the beat of the awful sounds, however muffled, Avery and the others inched forward through the gloom.
“What is this place?” said Hildra, awe in her voice.
“That,” said Avery, “is a very good question. I assume it’s older than the city, and that the city grew up around it. Did the giants worship it?”
“I don’t think they worshipped it,” Layanna said. “But what lived in it.”
Something cold dripped down Avery’s spine. “What lived here?”
“I’m ... not sure.”
“But you have an idea.”
“The air has a particular feel, and the crystalline construction of this Dome ...”
“Yes?”
“It could be the Ygrith.”
It took him a moment. “The lost race of gods your people came to this world to find? The ones the R’loth were trying to commune with?”
“I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”
They pushed on through the mist, which was warm and constantly moving, as if alive or directed by something, some machinery, even some mind. Avery couldn’t tell what manner of enclosure they moved through, whether hall or closet or some vast chamber; the mist swallowed up sound so that he couldn’t hear echoes off any wall or ceiling and use that to judge the distance. At any rate, the group didn’t run into any obstructions. Did that mean the area under the Dome was one single room? Was that even possible? It occupied numerous square miles.
Then the mist shifted, and reality broke.
A curtain of purple vapor peeled back, revealing a distant vista, and the group stopped and, as one, sucked in their breaths.
“Fuck a duck,” said Hildra.
In the distance, across blades of grass like thrusts of ebon flesh, reared a great rust-colored mountain, or what at first looked like a mountain, its peak lost in green clouds. But then, to Avery’s horror, he saw the first joint, then the second, and he realized the mountain was no mountain at all, but the protrusion of a carapace of some unimaginable behemoth.
“Gods below,” said Janx.
The mountain shifted, and the sky flashed indigo. A roaring filled Avery’s ears that caused him to stumble back and fall to his knees, and the others stumbled around him.
The mist closed up, obscuring the terrible mountain that wasn’t a mountain, and when Hildra, swearing and weaving from side to side, reeled drunkenly forward to curse the sight, she did not step on ebon flesh-grass but on the same soft, loamy floor they’d been treading on this whole time. The alien world had vanished, if it had ever been.
“I don’t get it,” Janx said, rubbing his ears. Avery still heard the roar in his, and suspected he would for hours to come. The big man looked to Layanna for answers.
“I don’t understand it, either,” she confessed. “Perhaps this place is some sort of gateway, a nexus of dimensions. I don’t know. But that ... thing ... that mountain ...” She was pale. Swallowing, she said no more.
They walked on, and a little later the mist shifted again. This time it revealed a vision of a cracked wasteland, the ground made of what looked like pink terra cotta split by heat or time, and out of the fissures poured a tide of huge spider-like things bristling with ragged feathers. They seemed engaged in a war with a just-arriving enemy, awful shapes winging through the sky, their forms shifting moment to moment and impossible for Avery’s mind to make sense of ...
The mist closed again, concealing the strange world and stranger battle, and the group walked along, muttering and glancing over their shoulders to make sure none of the giant spiders had followed them.
Suddenly, Hildra exclaimed at something, and at first Avery thought it was another vision of an alien world, but then he saw her pointing, and his heart leapt; a line of glowing blooms led off into the mist.
“The ghost flowers!” he said. “We’ve found them.”
“Now all we have to do is follow,” said Layanna.
“Ha!” said Hildra. “In a few moments we’ll be able to kill all those fuckin’ Starfish! Die, Starfish, die!” She clapped Layanna repeatedly on the back. “You ready to drink a bunch of nectar, honey? I knew you liked to swallow.”
Layanna narrowed her eyes. Moving forward, they followed the line of blooms, and then, at last, through swirls of mist, Avery saw another line, and, in the other direction, still another.
“We’re here,” he said, heart beating fast. “We’ve done it.”
Before them, at the junction of a dozen great shoots, rose a gleaming egg-like shape—not translucent like those in the vision but dark and vegetable-like, thick and bloated, perhaps fifty feet in diameter and more than that high. It rose from a hill carpeted in thorny ferns, and overhead floated four strange moons and a smattering of stars that Avery had never seen before. The others exclaimed in puzzlement, and he wondered when the ground beneath his feet had changed. It had either happened very suddenly or so slowly he hadn’t noticed.
“Are we on another world?” said Hildra. “I mean, if this is a gateway or whatever ...”
They looked to Layanna for clarification, but she merely bit her lip and shook her head. She had eyes only for the great egg on its hill.
“This is it,” she said, and her voice was hardly above a breath. “We’re here.”
“That’s what makes my tat glow, eh?” Janx said. “I should have the bastard burned off.”
“Is it responsible for the phenomena of alchemy?” Avery said. “Or part of it? I mean, if it gives off, well, energies, that p
roduce the nectar and other alchemical substances, then this is the source of alchemy, after a fashion.”
“There may be other ruins,” Layanna said. “Other sources. I don’t know.”
“Let’s finish this up,” Janx said.
“Yes. I’ll ingest the nectar. Wait here.”
“But if you drink it …”
“When we get clear I’ll be able to separate the nectar from myself and store it in an organelle. It will be safe there until we return, and when the Starfish arrives I’ll be ready to ingest it and use the abilities it gives me on the creature, assuming the drills can bore a hole in the Starfish’s exoskeleton so that I can reach the thing’s brain.”
“Go on, then, blondie, do your thing,” Hildra said.
Layanna started to take a step toward the great egg—
She stopped suddenly. Avery swore. Of course.
Sheridan had pressed her pistol against Layanna’s skull.
Instantly Janx and Hildra raised their weapons to point at Sheridan.
“Do it and die,” Janx said, and there was gravel in his voice.
“I’m prepared,” Sheridan said. “Are you?”
“Try me,” Janx said.
“Kill me and you all die. You need my dirigibles to escape the city, but I don’t need you. Drop your guns.”
“If we do, you’ll kill us,” Hildra said.
“Don’t do this,” Avery told her.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Sheridan said. “I can’t let her stop the Starfish.” Tugging at the clasp of her belt—the grenade belt, Avery saw—she unfastened it and threw it to him. He caught the belt with a frantic lurch. “I need you to embed those in that egg. Equidistant points all around it. Then blow it.”
“But why? You don’t need to do that if you’re just trying to prevent Layanna from drinking from it. You would just shoot her. Unless ...” He blinked. “Is there something in the egg—something that you want?”