The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  She stepped back, dropping her sword for one exhausted moment upon seeing us, but her greeting smile fell when she saw that, whomever she had expected, we were not they. But it gave her a moment, for the pale men, as one, stopped what they were doing as well and turned to face us in eerie silence. Not one face showed surprise, anger, or fear. One of the men simply motioned and the bulk of them immediately fell upon us, clubs and nets at the ready. The balance rushed the dais. For all the ferocity of their attack, none spoke, shouted, or even scowled. They were the most serene antagonists I had ever faced.

  But if our enemies were lacking in drive or passion, we ourselves were not. With a cry I charged them, and the same tactics that had scattered the conservationists at the research station worked to similar effect here—save that at the research station I was intent only on escape, and I did not have a bull gorilla at my back.

  Our battlefield was too small to allow swinging my staff, so I shortened my grip and used it as a polearm. The novelty of this tactic against my foes proved itself again and again, as their clubs had a shorter range and many a man found himself knocked to the floor by a solid poke in the face or belly.

  I felt a club graze my arm and I turned straight into one of their nets. Flinging up the staff in front of me, I managed to catch the edge of the net and bat it aside, but it left me open to attack. Off-balance I kicked one man and literally fell out of the path of another's club.

  On the floor all legs looked alike, but since Timash's gaudy pants were not among them, I poked and tripped with abandon. Some fell on me and tried to pinion me—much to their own harm, as I was fully as much stronger than they as I was any other Thoran, and a better shield from the pummeling of their fellows I could not have asked.

  I reared up, battled my way to the opposite wall and turned to fight again with my back secure. Timash was at the center of a rising pile of bodies, holding a man by the neck in each hand. He shook them around until they went limp, then dropped them and grabbed two more. The woman had leapt down from her perch and was slashing indiscriminately, blood flying, covering over older stains on her clothes and face. I could not see Harros.

  It was over within moments, the last man falling to my and Timash's superior strength or the sword of their former prey. As it ended, Harros burst through the doorway.

  "I was carried outside by their rush," he explained. "But I chased them off." He glanced past me, and I turned. The woman crouched behind me, her sword still ready.

  "It's all right," I said slowly. "We came to help you." I lay the staff on the ground and backed up a step. She glanced at us, then at the staff, straightened, and made a motion with the grip of her sword. Instantly it contracted in on itself, forming an eight-inch rod which she placed against the leg of her jumpsuit. When she removed her hand, the rod remained in place. She bent to pick up my staff.

  "That was nice work; thanks. But why didn't you just use the sword?"

  I blinked. I had no idea to what she was referring, and I fear it showed in my expression. To be sure, my sudden idiocy was not entirely due to ignorance: As she pulled her fingers through her coppery hair, it became apparent even through the stains and the blood that this woman was extraordinarily beautiful.

  Her features were bold without insolence, her skin a translucent olive, and her figure, obvious enough even in utilitarian Nuum uniform clothes, was modeled more on the women of my own time than the thin, boyish females of this tragic earth. I felt a stab of guilt in knowing that even Hana Wen would take a back seat to this woman in any beauty contest I might judge.

  Perhaps she was used to the male reaction, because she waited for my answer what seemed many moments.

  "My name's Marella," she said at last. If there was any more to her, she was not prepared to say. "What’s yours?"

  I shook myself, hearing Timash smother a giggle behind me, and introduced us all.

  A man at her feet stirred; she knelt down, unclipped her sword/club, and clipped him smartly on the side of the head.

  "We'd better go. There'll be more of them."

  At Timash's suggestion we took refuge in one of the upper floors of a building some distance away. As he pointed out, the unique architecture of this city (whose name, it came out, was as much a mystery to Marella as ourselves) gave avenues of escape in various directions even on the second and third stories, while giving us likewise a greater field of view. I think he also relished the possibility of climbing; ever since that day we escaped the tiger spiders, he had resurrected the arboreal habits of his ancestors at every opportunity. Even Balu had thought it odd.

  Practical as only a woman could be, Marella had torn shreds of cloth from the clothing of some of our late opponents and was now busily scrubbing and scraping such stains as she could from her hands and face. She had offered us some, but as we had just bathed (twice) in the river, we declined. Nor were we as greatly in need; neither Timash nor I had spilled any blood to speak of, and Harros was almost fresh.

  Keeping watch from inside the window, I inquired of Marella how she had found herself in this situation.

  "I was on a sky barge crossing the plain on my way home. I'm from Dure." She paused, as if to await our reaction, but all she received was three blank stares. I understood why Timash and I failed to react, and apparently Harros was not much of a traveler himself, but Marella found us all incredible. "Hello? You know—Dure? The Island Continent—across the big water?" She shook her head. "Men…" After a moment she recollected my question and decided, whatever her personal opinion of us, civility did demand an answer.

  "Anyway, I'm a force field tech on the barge. It's called the Dark Lady. We're ferrying some nobles home, and one of them sees this deserted city down here, so naturally, he has explore it." She shook her head again, her opinion no less obvious for being unspoken. "Well, no sooner do we set down the schooner than this big—" she looked around at us, set her lips, and changed what she was about to say— "really big thunder lizard comes crashing out of nowhere. Of course Lord Masinto is the first one back on the schooner, screaming at everybody to shoot the thing and take off at the same time, and meanwhile the officers are trying to get everybody on board but the thunder lizard's on their tail and so they take off and I'm still on the ground," she finished in a rush. "I got away from the lizard okay, 'cause he was watching the schooner (and probably laughing his ass off at Masinto), but I was looking for some water when those jokers you saw started chasing me and cornered me in that basement."

  "We were outside the wall when we heard you scream," I explained.

  Her brows knit. "Did I scream?" I nodded. "Huh. Must've startled me."

  "I'm sure it was involuntary, and quite understandable under the circumstances," Harros assured her. I didn't like the tone of his voice —it struck me as rather more oily than our brief acquaintance with the lady warranted—but as she didn't seem to take offense I let it lie. If she were a lady sailor, as I gathered, she had probably heard worse.

  She ignored him, in any event, and turned the tables on me.

  "So what's your story? How come you're out here in the middle of nowhere?"

  I explained that our vehicle had broken down and we had approached the city looking for shelter. I had thought to omit our own encounter with the thunder lizard lest Marella take it as the trumped-up tale of a braggart, but Timash was all for telling it, so I let him.

  When he had finished, Marella turned again to me. "That's your idea of 'our groundcar broke down?' Flattened by a thunder lizard? What do you do for excitement, wrestle breen?"

  "Don't say that word!" Timash scolded. "It makes my nose itch."

  A moment later, as if on cue, Marella's eyes became very wide, and then I smelled it too, a wet-dog pungency that I had never smelled before but knew at once:

  Breen.

  27. I Am Caged

  Timash, near the window, lifted his nose to sniff the air once more.

  "It's awfully faint," he reported hesitantly. "They may not be anywhere near
here; maybe they just spent the night here or something."

  Marella's mien was grim, her baton again extended into a sword.

  "I don't care if they haven't been here since the King's last birthday. I don't want to be in the same city with them."

  "You can stop worrying so much," Harros announced with unusual celerity. He stepped into the room holding a ragged bit of something that might once have been cloth—or then again, it might well have been fur, or something else better not dwelled upon. "This is where the smell is coming from."

  Taking his orders from Marella's disgusted expression, Harros quickly exited the room, taking the offensive odor with him, nor did he return for some minutes. While he was gone, Marella retracted her blade, turning a puzzled eye upon me.

  "You know, you did pretty well back there with that staff—but why didn't you just use the sword? I mean, the quarters were pretty tight—and they were using nets. I may not be much good with a staff, but even if I were I wouldn't have used it in that situation."

  I had been watching her, and I knew now that she controlled her baton by use of differing hand grips: one made the sword blade extend, another made it retract. Except in these respects, her weapon looked just like my own, and that made me wonder. I held it out and gave her a sheepish grin.

  "Actually, I don't know very much about this thing. I was a librarian before they shanghaied me onto a ship and brought me down here to fight Thorans."

  "You were a librarian?" She cast a glance at Timash. "What was—never mind. You must not have had a whole lot of overdue reading crystals." Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the staff weapon. "It's really simple if you know the trick—and it was designed to keep energy weapons out of the hands of the Thorans. Twist like this, and you've got a sword; like this, and it's back to a baton for carrying; like this, and—you've got a staff. Here, you try."

  As she had promised, once the basic holds were mastered, it was child's play to move from one to another configuration, as long as you remembered always to return to the basic "baton" position; you could not switch directly from sword to staff, but with that minor impediment, it was a marvelous close-in weapon—or rather, three weapons. Testing the balance of the two, I quickly learned to prefer the sword over the bulkier staff.

  Stepping back, I assumed a fencer's stance. Although my spoken "En garde," was incomprehensible to Marella, she immediately took my meaning, and just as quickly set out to take my measure.

  There was no flash of blades, no singing on metal slicing off opposing metal: our foils (for such they appeared to me; I later found them to have the strength of sabers) whipped and whispered evilly through the air, sliding off each other with a liquid smoothness that so took me by surprise the first time that I almost impaled myself on Marella's point. She was on the verge of calling the match, but I waved her on again, concentrating on relinquishing conscious control of my muscles and allowing the Librarian's tutelage, as well as my own long-ago lessons, to press my suit.

  Marella toyed with me at first, but as I gained confidence, I could see the light in her eyes darkening with her own increasing effort, until at length we broke off by mutual consent, sweat staining our clothes anew. I saluted her as no opponent had been saluted in almost a million years, but after a second's hesitation, she returned my gesture with a shy smile.

  Then she laughed. "A librarian. Right."

  I shrugged, embarrassed.

  "Uh, Keryl," Timash interrupted. "Where's Harros?"

  And as seemed to recur with horrific frequency in that city of the dead and dying, we heard a scream in the near distance.

  We found Harros in a nearby courtyard, panting and down on one knee, surrounded by four men of the race of our recent adversaries, all dead. A bloody club belonging to one of his late antagonists lay at his side.

  "I was looking for a place to bury the rag, and they came at me out of that doorway." He pointed weakly. "I managed to grab the first one's club and fight them off." He paused, catching his breath. "It looked like they were trying to take me alive."

  "Was that one of them that screamed?" Marella asked, eyes darting to and fro. When Harros nodded, she said: "We'd better get moving. There could be more of them."

  As I was to learn, Marella had an almost preternatural habit of being right. As if by magic, every doorway and every overhanging balcony was suddenly crawling with pale and emaciated men. We were trapped like rats.

  Even after a relatively short time enjoying their forced hospitality, I was compelled to admit that the Vulsteen were the oddest human beings I had met in two eras. And when you come to realize that I include in my definition of "human beings" an entire city of talking gorillas, that is quite a broad statement.

  Notwithstanding that our capture meant the containment of those who had murdered (from their point of view) a number of their fellows, or that it capped a campaign which had commenced with a concerted effort to net Marella and ended with an additional three prisoners, it was with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for victory that they disarmed us and marched us through a maze of dusty tunnels to their home ground. I had been prepared at first to meet my Creator, and even when they made it plain that, as Harros had guessed, they meant to take us alive, I still apprehended the mistreatment to which we might be subject at their hands, most particularly Marella, the abuse of female prisoners being a constant throughout history that I had little hope of having been discontinued before now.

  Yet nothing of the like occurred; we were herded in a single line by our unspeaking captors into the subterranean city of the Vulsteen, which to my knowledge has no name, or at least none was ever used in my hearing. Doubtless the inhabitants, a phlegmatic people to say the least, have never perceived the need, since they neither communicate with, nor seek, others outside their own community—except as prisoners, and those rarely.

  At first the city itself was as uncommunicative of the life of its people as were they themselves. The Vulsteen were burrowers; generations long dead had been driven underground by their own fear of the thunder lizards and the breen, and by their own lax ambition, too lazy or unimaginative to mount an aggressive defense. This was my assessment of the winding, crudely-hewn halls, frequently broken by finer work where the tunnelers had incorporated existing basements and foundations into their own work.

  Then imagine my surprise when, in one of these rocky corridors, I came face-to-face with a mural of surpassing beauty! Red and orange predominated, blazing away from the other, duller hues as though the wall itself had caught fire! And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, half-way up a wall, a few lone streaks trailing away as though all at once the artist had lost interest in his project and simply walked away.

  The Vulsteen marched impassively past this startling sight, but my companions, too, stumbled with shock, causing one of our captors to shove Harros in a mechanically nonvindictive fashion. At intervals we came upon more examples of such work, each as passionately emblazoned as the last, yet each abandoned in mid-stroke. And each lay upon the wall of a relatively flat portion of the unfinished tunnels, providing sure evidence that these, our inert guides, sprang from the same loins as the race that had authored those works.

  The long march gave me ample time to puzzle over these questions, and at length an answer sprang forth in beautiful simplicity: The men and women who had painfully carved these tunnels many years gone had also been Vulsteen, but even in their decline one among many had retained a spark of mad artistry, one in a thousand who had attempted to arouse in his fellows some grand passion by the expression of what passed, under these distressed circumstances, as great art. The paintings' abrupt endings bespoke a sudden, grisly end to these brave souls; I could easily believe that the forefathers of the men who had captured us could kill in fear of such grand gestures.

  Strange as it might appear, I found this explanation comforting, for it allowed me to categorize my enemies, assign to them a known quantity that might be used in our efforts to escape. Men who
would burrow underground rather than fight, kill their own rather than think, these were animals with brains. Marella, Harros—and yes, Timash—and I were brains in the bodies of animals. Our inspiration, our courage, would see us quit of these lifeless barbarians—even if we could not count on the Librarian for help, and if the situation warranted, I would not hesitate to reveal even that secret to Harros and Marella.

  Thus fortified, I walked with a lighter step, my eyes darting to and fro, taking the measure of the Vulsteen and finding them wanting. Their ingrained societal numbness would prove their Achilles heel. I almost smiled with the irony of it all as I passed yet another mural…

  …until I reached the far end and saw the fiery red paint still dripping and wet.

  I smelled our destination before I saw it. Here, in a world where the walls literally formed the edges of civilization, every foot of circumscribed space was precious. We did not warrant much. At one end of the "city," yawned an open pit, whose odor advertised what seemed a community dump and charnel pit.

  "Oh my god," Harros yelped. "They're not going to throw us in there…?"

  Much as we might have deplored the panic with which Harros offered his opinion, we were nonetheless unanimous in our agreement with it. I dug in my heels and the others did the same, but there were far too many Vulsteen pushing, and we tumbled, one by one, into the pit.

  It was not the fall that filled me with sudden dread. The bottom of the pit was coated with muck and debris; disgusting as it was, it broke our fall so that none of us was hurt. Nor was it the spectre of renewed capture; I had been a prisoner before, and I knew escape would present itself: We had not been herded down here simply to be discarded. When our captors wanted us, we must be ready; that was all.

  No, the horror that rushed up to meet us all transcended the mud, and the loneliness, and the smell of the hundreds that had come and gone before us. In the pit it permeated and suffused and overcame all other smells, all other senses.