Halfway down, the trees thinned out. The smell was just as stifling, even as the air and sky opened around them. As the hill leveled out, Hafi turned to head straight down the next decline of the mountainside. The trees near them seemed to wither. Leaves on some branches were dead. The air was still. There was not a single sound of birds or the gentle rustling of wildlife. Silence hung in the air, wrapping itself around them like the scent had.
Hafi knew what the smell was, of course. He had seen many massacres. The smell of old blood and decay was not foreign to him. What was odd was the location. There had been no battle nearby. The entire war with the Xenai was about 5 miles to the west of them in the mountains. The only Xenai troops in the area had been a small group of scouts to the south. He had turned the small band of farmers and soldiers this way to avoid the scouts while they were evacuating. The small group was mostly Illara, with himself, Lee and a young farmer couple as the only Terrans. They were lucky. A troop of Terrans would have gotten much closer to the Xenai before anyone noticed them. But the few Illara in the group that were gifted with the Intuition had felt the Xenai presence. Hafi had sent the Illara soldiers to scout, and they had returned with the grim news that the Xenai blocked their former path. With as many children as adults in the group, and only a half-dozen soldiers, they were in no position to fight the Xenai, or even distract them.
So, here they were, on a path that wasn’t a path at all, walking into the thick scent of massacre and death. As Hafi worked his way down the slope of the mountain, he saw a plateau in their decline. A small outcropping of red rock lay slightly south of their location. He turned again to travel horizontally across the mountainside. Small rocks jutted out from where the mountainside turned into a pure vertical drop of thirty feet. Not high enough to kill either Hafi or Lee, but enough to make Hafi’s head spin. He hated heights, but knew he couldn’t send Lee to the edge to look at what lay in the flat terrain below. He stepped halfway out, just far enough to get a view to the east where Prin lay behind the hard to see crack in the cliff wall.
Bounded on three sides by similarly steep hills, the valley was the last segment of the mountain to get through before approaching the west side of Prin. Every entry point from the three mountain sides were precarious and created small, natural barriers to any large army movements. The east side was not wide open, but a wall of rock thirty feet deep—with only the one small pathway through it. The path itself came out of the cliff face beside Prin, right in the center of the sight lines from the Statehouse, where Prin had built its strongest defenses and placed its most skilled snipers. If the Pact put its army on the east side of the cliffs, any push by the Xenai through the choke point would be near suicidal. Even if the Xenai could push past Prin's immediate defenses on the other side and spread out to the north and south, the weaponry held by Prin could wipe out anyone in the fields outside its fortifications.
This was the scenario that Hafi looked for first. Had some Xenai force gotten around his men, leaving Prin’s army to fight them off? The funnel made by the cliff walls was clear. In fact, the eastern half of the valley he could see looked exactly as expected. He took a slow step further out on the rock. Lee was creeping out behind him. Hafi waved him back as he looked down into the valley straight below. A wave of nausea overtook him. He recognized immediately that what had been a dry, empty plain was now a lake of blood. He felt as if the lake knew he was here, looking down at it. He could see it in his mind, rushing up towards him, forming arms of crimson waterspouts that would grab him off his ledge and suck him into a sudden whirlpool mouth that would vanish after it devoured him. He quickly stepped back, nearly knocking Lee over.
“What—”
Hafi quickly covered the boy’s mouth with his hand while bringing his other hand up to put a finger to his own lips. He stepped out of the way and gestured to the boy to look for himself. He watched Lee creep up even slower to the edge. The boy was no soldier and had no thought to check the cliffs for any sign of a battle. Instead, he looked straight down into the bloody field. His almond skin paled, and he backed up in a scramble.
Hafi gestured the boy to follow him further up the hill, then gave him orders, “Go back to the group. Send out Yorshe and Maltro to find a path north without Xenai in the way. As soon as they do, you take everyone through. Then circle back around to reach Prin from the north. It’ll add a few days to the journey, but you cannot take the civilians through that without knowing what it is.” Lee nodded and headed back up the hill, when the full situation dawned on him. He turned to look down at Hafi, “You’re not coming back with me?”
Hafi shook his head. “We need to know what it is. That’s my job now. We are close enough to Prin. I can get there through this path if nothing is… alive. If I get through, I will gather reinforcements to meet you on the northern path.”
The discomfort on Lee’s face was contagious, and what had seemed to be the logical move to Hafi now felt like his own death sentence. It was too late now. It had to be done, and he was the only one who could do it without endangering the group. As Lee stood digesting the information, Hafi reached out, placed a hand on each of the boy’s shoulders, and turned him to face back up the mountainside.
“Be quick. Be quiet. Go.”
The boy moved and quickly vanished into the trees.
Hafi turned on his heel. He stood for a moment, the valley out of sight. He recalled the vision of it over and over again until conjuring up the image didn’t provoke fear or the urge to run. He walked toward the southern hill, taking the longest but easiest path down.
Hafi descended and with each step, the foliage on the ground darkened, until all the green and golden hues preparing for the winter turned to various shades of red and small sharp thorn like protrusions of red crystal grew on the plants. Nearest to the ground, the thorns were thickest, thinning as the foliage became taller. The smell continued to grow, assaulting him with such intensity that every other sense dimmed in comparison. He could not hear any wind or movement other than his own. He was aware of the sound of branches breaking as he stepped on them, but the only sound he really heard was the squish of the ground as he walked. Each drop of his sweat turned to blood in his own mind as it ran down his body, until he felt as though it drenched him, even though there were only small accumulations of red mud on his armored boots. He tasted wet copper sliding down his throat like clots of flesh each time he swallowed.
He pulled his rifle from its strap and stepped down onto the flat ground of the valley. His boot crunched on something beneath it, then slipped down into a slurry of crimson. His composite armor had no traction on the slimy mud beneath the fluid, so he took a second to steady himself in the muck. He lowered his center of gravity until he felt solid, and pivoted with care to check the edges of the field, ready to fire at anything that moved. Everything was still.
Hafi took slow, calculated steps, making sure each foot was secure before shifting his weight onto it. The crunch of each step faded as he moved further into the swamp. He assumed that he had been walking on the red crystals that were now larger and protruding out of the goo. He realized how oddly beautiful they were. Like giant rubies growing into the red brush. This deep in the field, many bushes seemed to have grown around larger crystal formations that came up to his shins.
He continued to move with caution, finding that the red fluid was getting deeper. In the mountain air, the fluid was cool against him as he felt it seeping through the cracks of his armor and soaking through his underlying cloth suit. It didn’t take long before he was wading through the bloody basin. Occasionally, a large mound of rock or harder mud was on the floor of the lake. His boot would slip over it until it found a firm enough spot to stand on the other side. He could not see through the liquid well enough to determine what these lumps in the mixture were.
He should have skirted the edge of the weird swamp. He knew that being out in the middle of the mess was a poor tactic, but the thought of taking the long way through the mess w
as too much and he knew he could not keep control over the growing horror in his mind for much longer. Instead, he glanced around the edges and back to his destination with every step he took.
His foot slipped again over something round and long. He had written off these objects as fallen branches or logs that had been soaked through and accumulated layers of bloody slime. But this time, his boot caught on some part of the object, dredging it up between his legs as he planted his foot ahead of it. He looked at the smooth object. It started out thick but thinned out at the other end. The shape was not a fallen branch or other foliage. He shifted his weight to his back leg, placed the toe of his boot under the object and pushed the smaller end up out of the sludge. It flopped upwards, spraying drops of red as it broke free of the surface. Hafi recognized what had been a forearm, with a hand still attached. A few fingers were missing, but the ones that were left held a stiff and slightly curled grasp that he had seen many times before. It gripped at the air in obvious torment before slipping back under the ripples of crimson fluid.
Hafi pushed through the fluid with renewed vigor. Each step over an object now conjured fresh images in Hafi’s mind. He frantically scrambled to make sense of it all, as if assigning a body part to what he was stepping on and over made it better. As his mind raced to solve a puzzle that was ultimately unimportant, he realized that he could hear a noise other than his own movement in the field of blood. There was a low hum. It took him a moment to slow down the momentum he had built up in the water, but he came to a halt, even though his mind was yelling at him to move faster. He could not feel any vibrations in the ground. He glanced around. There was nothing visible in the field. He was nearly halfway through the valley before the pass. He was just a few steps away from where the plants and trees turned back to greens and browns.
He resumed moving, thrusting each leg through the liquid as hard as he could, pausing for just a moment to check his footing before leaning into the next stride. The humming did not get louder or go away. The consistency of the noise drove itself into his mind, and he felt panic well up inside his chest. He picked up the pace. With each step, he reminded himself to find solid footing before shifting his weight. The reminders fell flat, and his speed increased, and he knew that he was not checking his footing well enough. Even so, he pushed harder toward the pass. He nearly fell three times as he moved through the mushy red ground.
The depth of the red lessened. First, returning to cover merely the tops of his boots. Then it barely came halfway up them. As he emerged from the weight of the lake, he moved faster, free from the physical weight but taking on another weight as he scanned the valley and continued to move. He was no longer finding body parts in the soup, but seeing them and bounding over them. He found he had not been imaginative enough. While legs and arms were a part of the mixture, other parts were entrails and organs. A few pieces belonged to rabbits, alongside the head of a fox. One part on a mound nearly clear of blood was smooth and spongy, and the only name he could assign to it was brain. The white chunks on the ground beside it looked like pieces of skull. Another few feet away lay what was a jawbone. Crystals had grown over the part of the bone that touched the ground, creating the strange impression of a crown put on the wrong way.
Hafi took a last leap out of the muck onto the patch of ground next to the brain and bone fragments. From there, he could leap from one clear spot to another, until he was out of the bloody field entirely. He kept moving. He was nearly to the cliff pass before he realized he was running at full speed. His heart was pounding, and he could hear nothing else. He stopped to catch his breath. The stench of everything he had experienced in the field was still coating him. His armor was tinted red from the knees down. He shivered with relief as he realized he was clear.
As his breath slowed and his mind cleared, the humming returned. It was less like a distant vibration now, and more like a note being sung—a single note hanging around him. He pushed it back in his mind as he leaned forward, placing his hands on his knees and gulping for breath. Each breath quivered and gave out before he had fully drawn it in. He cursed at himself for his own lack of fortitude and thought of the soldiers on the other side of the pass. His soldiers. He stood and looked back at the field, breathing each shaky breath and replaying his walk through the blood swamp. He saw himself running to where he stood now and told himself no one else could ever see him run like that. His breathing was steady enough, then.
He turned back toward Prin. The guards of the pass were minutes away, likely already alerted that someone was coming through the pass. He found himself singing a single note softly as he walked through to the end of the pass with a smile on his face.
5
Tani
Tani took a deep breath as she looked out from the small tunnel into the open, bustling market way. The intense sound of life, restrained and refracted by old stone and a dozen feet of earth, crashed into her. Gritting her teeth and placing a hand on the wall as she felt lightheaded, she looked forward to the stall she needed to get to, mapping her path before she stepped down onto the floor of the market and was swept forward into the crowd. Once she was in the throng of people, she followed the path in her mind—seemingly the only person there that had a destination in mind, rather than loitering and talking.
As a space cleared in the surrounding people, the bright fluorescent flood lamps shone through. She winced as she felt the shot of pain from her eyes but continued on her way, squinting in preparation for another beam of wretched light to blind her. When she heard her name being called, she turned in circles, searching with her eyes half closed for Vin, but could not find him.
“Tani! Tani!”
She stopped hearing her name after a few calls and gave up her search a few moments later, only to hear the voice next to her ear.
“Right here, you dunce.”
“God dammit, Vin.” She turned enough to roll her eyes at him before continuing towards the large tables by the noodle stand where they liked to poach the undisposed plates that the wealthy left behind on tables. She left it to Vin to stay with her as she weaved in between people. She heard him clumsily apologizing behind her.
“Sorry. Excuse—sorry—no, I, just—Sorry—”
His chain of apologies faded as she got further ahead, but they both knew where they were going. He arrived several minutes after she had grabbed a spot on the edge of a table occupied by some kids that appeared to be college students playing tourist. They wore the lightly embroidered robes and cloaks common to the students of the source academy. Affluent enough to be selected for the Academy meant a high chance of leaving behind food without thinking about it. Vin sat across the table from her to cover both sides whenever the group stood up.
He leaned forward across the table to whisper at her, hovering off the bench, even though in the market's din they could talk about nearly anything without their conversation being overheard. “Did you see the schematics, Tani?”
“There are a lot of schematics in the world, Vin. You will have to be more specific.”
He smiled, “Not today, there aren’t. You’re going to enjoy these.” He pulled out his LightTab and a short second later, Tani felt her own vibrate in the front pocket of her baggy cloth pants. She didn’t bother pulling it out, but just shrugged over at Vin.
He rolled his eyes, “You really need to get a new Tab.” He handed his over to her across the table. His unregistered LightTab was worth a fortune before the rumors of war started. Now, with possible conscription for all registered Undergrounders between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, it was worth Topside credits. More credits than either of them had seen in their lives—or likely would see. He never seemed to care that he could have traded it for a registered Tab and gotten enough credits from the deal to buy him the best food in Prin for months. Whenever she pointed it out to him when they were scavenging for food, he shrugged and said something similar to, "The only thing I like more than food is ninjas. Since I can’t actually be invisibl
e and murder-y, I like to pretend I’m a SatNet ninja."
Tani took the priceless Tab extended to her and looked at it. The screen was a mess of lines and symbols laid over a vaguely Terranoid form. The form was tall and thin, the arms slightly too long compared to the rest of the body.
She didn’t know what she was looking at, at first. Next to the original document, someone had created a digitized version, separating the image into layers. It was nothing like the schematics of wiring and housings she was used to working with, but it spoke to her. It felt as if the unknown Author thought like she did. Everything is a system. The systems here made little sense, for now, but she knew they would all merge into an understanding, eventually. As she scrolled deeper into the layers, she reached the image that made it all click. Source crystals. Her eyes shot up to meet Vin’s.
“Xenai?”
Vin nodded. “That’s the theory. No one knows where the schematic came from, but it's a scan of old documents. Someone from Praha already used the Old Terra analysis machine on it; they authenticated the source files. The original schematic is older than the Sundering.”
Tani tapped out of the layered digital version and zoomed into the original document. It was worn yellow and brown paper with layers of dark ink splashed with colors to differentiate each system. She zoomed in and out of the image, recreating the lines and symbols in her head as she went, “Has anyone corroborated their findings?”
Song of Sundering Page 4