Lords of the Seventh Swarm

Chapter 43

Thomas gripped his pulp pistol with both hands. Dozens of sfuz scampered along the ceiling, whistling a strange, frenetic call, issuing from a wide passage that led lower into the city. Their purple-black eyes gleamed in the light of Felph’s glow globe.

Felph dropped into a crouch and fired rapidly. Black gobbets of gore blasted from the sfuz. Felph screamed in fury, as if possessed, “Back me, back me!”

Thomas stood at Felph’s back, firing over his head. Something heavy hit Thomas, knocking him forward, and a searing pain in Thomas’s ribs told him he’d been stabbed.

He fell into Felph, knocking the lord headlong, but Thomas had the presence of mind to spin as he fell, firing twice.

A sfuz stood over Thomas.

The creature’s lower jaw disintegrated under the force of the gunfire.

Thomas whirled again, opening fire on a sfuz on the ceiling directly above.

The thing exploded, dropped like a bag of warm mud, knocking Thomas backward, so his head slammed into the floor.

Everything went dark for a moment, and he woke to Felph shrieking, shrieking, firing his weapon. Thomas pushed a dead sfuz off his face with one hand, rolled to an elbow.

Felph stood, ringed by four sfuz. One had tossed a sticky net over him, so Felph’s left hand lay pinned to his body. Felph screamed, desperately fired his weapon. His gun was empty.

Thomas snapped a shot at the nearest sfuz. The shot hit the floor and exploded into shrapnel. Perhaps that saved them. If he’d hit the sfuz directly, the shell would have exploded within the creature. As it was, the shell sent fragments into two sfuz, so they dropped to the floor.

More importantly it sent the last two racing out of view just as Thomas fired again, only to find his pulp gun empty.

Thomas stood taking stock of himself. His back hurt. The wound felt deep. Blood ran down his spine, and that firghtened him. He couldn’t see the wound and he was so much in shock, he could hardly feel it. It seemed he stood outside himself, recognizing something was wrong, not knowing what.

Lord Felph, who crouched on the ground, did not glance at Thomas as he reloaded his pistol. He pulled off the spent clip and dropped a full one in reflexively, then charged forward.

Thomas wanted to ask Felph to turn around, to examine his wounds. He wanted to know if he bled badly, but his Guide would not let him speak.

So he staggered onward woodenly, impelled only by his Guide. Damn it, Thomas thought. If Karthenor doesn’t free me, he’ll use me up without knowing it.

Thomas imagined clutching Karthenor’s throat, imagined the revenge he’d extract when he got free.

Lord Felph clutched his glow globe so tightly, it lit like a star, and he rushed forward, excited, darting from side to side, glancing down each adjoining passage. He found a path that corkscrewed deeper into the city, till at last it opened onto a wide landing.

Here, a great battle had occurred. Dozens of dead dronon littered the floors, some with their carapaces split and spilling vile fluids. Sfuz lay among them, some crushed under Vanquishers’ battle arias.

But most corpses showed no external sign of damage. The limbs were horribly twisted and clenched, as happens when a creature suffocates. The air here was choked with smoke. Even now, hours after this battle, Thomas could hardly breathe. The corpses so cluttered this corridor-in many places stacked three or four deep.

In this battle, no one had emerged victorious.

Felph clambered over the bodies, forging down a long corridor whose sides rose up like canyon walls. Identical images had been carved in bas-relief on both stone walls: a birdlike creature, flying through flames, writhing in agony.

At the end of the corridor, the sfuz corpses lay piled so deep they blocked the passage ahead. Felph ran to them, climbed to the top of the heap, and pulled several dead sfuz away.

Thomas began clambering over the bodies, his feet sinking into the soft flesh, his hands punching into the warm fur as he dropped to all fours. The bodies shifted beneath his weight, making his feet sink in deeper, as if he climbed up sand.

Felph moved several bodies, enough to reveal a passage. Behind these corpses, in a darkened corridor, Thomas glimpsed a curtain of green light, green raindrops that glowed with their own light, falling into a vast pool.

“Here! Here!” Felph shouted. “The cisterns are here!”

Felph dropped his glow globe, pulled more sfuz aside.

Thomas suddenly felt as if he were being watched.

He spun, saw nothing but sfuz corpses, all lying so quietly. They terrified him. The sfuz, with their soft dark fur, felt warm, to his touch. Thomas knew they were warm because of fires that had burned here within the past hour or two. Marks from incendiary rifles scored the walls.

Yet Thomas feared that the sfuz would leap at his touch.

He couldn’t bear to pull at the corpses as Felph did. He felt trapped.

He whirled again, thought he caught a movement from the corner of his eye-the wispy gray shape of a sfuz, leaping away. But this shape had no body, only a shadow.

I’m imagining things, Thomas told himself.

Thomas shivered, looked down at his hand. His hand was on the belly of a sfuz, its legs curling helplessly up, like a dead spider’s. Its four eyes stared at him, undimmed in death. Perhaps this bothered him more than anything, to see these eyes, still glowing with life, even in death.

Up ahead, Felph finished pulling corpses away, began climbing down the bodies on the far side of the corridor. “Come on!” he shouted.

Thomas followed unwillingly, a human machine, scrambling over sfuz corpses, till he half-slid, half-tumbled down some bodies to stand beside Lord Felph at the opening of a vast chamber.

The green rain showered in a thin curtain before them, baffling his eyes so that Thomas could not see well beyond the opening of the chamber. Instead, his eyes were drawn to the curtain of dancing lights. The falling droplets made no sound as they dripped to the floor, nor did the huge droplets of light bounce on the stone and splinter under the impact.

Beyond this curtain of liquid light, Thomas could see an enormous cavern. The green rain did not fill the chamber. Instead it only showered along the wails, in a great irregular circle. From this, Thomas guessed that the far wall was back a quarter of a mile or more; the chamber rose hundreds of yards to the ceiling.

A vast dew tree filled most of this cavern, its trunk at least a hundred yards wide, rising up and up till it met the roof, then proceeded through the stone. The hoary roots of the tree splayed from it in every direction, like twisted fingers emerging from a purple hand, and among the roots were knobby pale growths, like knuckles.

Felph just stared. This tree, here in the stone cavern, was totally unexpected. And it was so huge. Everywhere its dark roots seemed to wriggle across the floor-veins and arteries. Something large, like an anteater, with an enormous snout, trundled along the ridge of one twisted root.

Wings flashed in the darkness around the bole of the tree.

Life. With the green rains and the unexpected forest, the movement of animals within that room, Thomas got the impression of abundant life, everywhere beyond that veil.

“Of course, of course there would be creatures here,” Felph said. “There can be no death in that room.”

Felph glanced up at the top of the chamber, far above, and Thomas followed his gaze. A machine covered its roof-vast and hoary. Thomas saw huge piping carved in the stone, engines whirring silently overhead. He could not guess the purpose of this great machine, but he could guess part-all along its edges, the green rain fell. As if the rain dropped from this machine.

Lord Felph seemed reluctant to enter the room, to pass through the veil of green light or perhaps he was merely curious. Experimentally, he held out the butt of his pulp pistol, so sheets of rain fell over it.

The green drops seemed not to spatter the gun, but merely to pass through.

In wonder, Felph said, “Well, I’ve never seen anything like this, nor heard of it.” He glanced at Thomas, as if to ask his opinion on whether they should proceed. Thomas could tell him nothing.

I am but a simple man of Tihrgias, he wanted to say. What do I know of such things?

Surprisingly, Thomas’s Guide let him speak. “Och, man, let’s tuck our tails between our legs and scurry out of here,” he said. Then he could say no more.

Karthenor had told Thomas to protect Felph. Perhaps a word of warning fulfilled that commandment.

Felph frowned. “It’s an energy field of some kind. I’ve heard of physicists who’ve tried to create stasis fields-holes in the universe where time ceases to exist, but they always collapse. Anything stored in such holes is destroyed.

But…see-” Felph pointed to his left, to a corner away from the tree, in an area of the vast chamber where Thomas had not even looked. There a mass of white bones lay in huge piles. Among the bones were strange, dusty, birdlike faces, staring out at them. “Qualeewoohs died there and rotted. Over the centuries, their bones fused.” Felph shook his head. “If the corpses are fossilized, time exists beyond this veil. So I wonder what the veil accomplishes?”

Lord Felph regarded the fossils thoughtfully. “And the bones make me wonder. Qualeewooh legend says that if one drinks the Waters of Strength, the Waters give eternal life. But if that is true, why is this room little more than a grave?”

Thomas shivered as he began to understand what treasure Felph sought. It frightened him to follow a man so obsessed.

“Tell me,” Felph said. “Do you think it could be true, that the Waters let some part of you-your spirit-travel to another dimension? If that is so, it may be that this energy field is really the portal, not the Water. Or perhaps the Water acts as a catalyst for a physical change that can occur within this room.”

Felph laughed giddily. “After six hundred years of seeking this end, I find myself frightened to enter this chamber.”

“Do not enter,” Thomas warned.

Felph ignored him, began talking rapidly. “You know, I have studied Qualeewoohs for centuries. They say ideas have life. The seeds of ideas exist outside us, and are planted in our minds by gods. The Qualeewoohs wear spirit masks to make that task easier.

“But they say in time, thoughts grow and take flight on their own.” Felph gazed past the barrier. “Most human biologists seem to believe that the Qualeewoohs’ sayings are a metaphor, a nice way to say we must not simply follow our heart, but should give it wings.”

Felph muttered under his breath. “I have sometimes wondered: could it be a metaphor for what happens when one drinks the Waters of Strength? Could the thoughts and intents of your heart take flight, transform into something else, some more pure and lasting form of life that exists beyond this dimension? The Qualeewoohs say their ancestors fly `between the stars.’ I’ve pondered that. Space. Empty space. Could they mean their ancestors exist in a realm without matter? Or in a world human science cannot yet weigh or measure. And if that is true, what would be the advantages of transferring one’s consciousness to that realm? And what might be the penalties? And would it be wise?”

“Do not go,” Thomas said one last time. He meant that Felph should not go into that new realm he spoke of with such glassy-eyed wonder. The notion terrified Thomas.

But Thomas’s words jarred Felph. He spun, gazing at Thomas as if he’d never seen him. “Of course I’ll go. This body is but a clone. This life one of many I can spend as I want! If the Waters kill me, what does it matter? Why shouldn’t I go?”

Thomas could give no reply.

Lord Felph turned and strode through the green rain, passed through, turned and stared back at it in surprise.

Thomas could only follow.

He touched the green veil with one hand, felt something cool, like a cold wind washing through him, like a million icicles piercing every fiber of his being. As he passed through the wall of shimmering rain, he felt a tug, as if he’d just pushed through a tangle of vines only to find something, something insubstantial, left behind.

Thomas, too, turned to look back, for he feared he’d see his body dead on the floor, on the other side of the veil.

But the corridor he’d just passed through was empty. Felph chuckled nervously, then turned and marched over the ground.

In the distance, among the folds of roots about the great tree, Thomas heard strange, hooting calls. Something made a noise like breaking glass, and Thomas thought he glimpsed shadowy movements, as if small animals scurried, but he could not see clearly in the half-light. The green shimmering rains did not give much radiance, not enough to see well by.

The ground crunched oddly beneath their feet. The floor was littered with white stones. Thomas hiked through the chamber as if by moonlight, and Felph raised his glow globe till it flooded the path at their feet with piercing whiteness.

At Thomas’s feet, an ancient purple skull stared at him from shadowy sockets, silver Iines engraved over every surface. Around the skull were bones, white bones of ribs and wings. These made the odd crunching. Thomas leapt aside in horror, jumped on a tangled mass of rubbery root instead.

Felph began breathing heavily, as in fear. “I’ll do this,” he whispered. “I will walk between the stars!”

He climbed a rubbery root, began jogging, waving his hands as he tried to balance. He followed the roots toward the great tree. “Dew trees always set their roots in water,” he explained as he ran, his shadow writhing behind. “The Waters must be just ahead.”

Thomas followed more clumsily. Something whistled over his head, and he felt beating wings, looked up to see some batlike creature with translucent wings flap past his shoulder.

It was not a long journey, but an arduous one. As the roots increased in thickness, Thomas found himself walking higher and higher above floor level, until he was dozens of meters up. Creatures scampered into hiding as they passed, lone- snouted furry things that had bored holes the width of a hand into the roots of the dew tree. From some of these holes the dew tree exuded a, sweet-smelling liquid; shrimplike insects in hundreds of sizes and colors huddled around these holes to feed, each waving a dozen small pincers at Thomas as he passed.

As Thomas ran, he saw a large, eyeless beast, like a lizard, quietly clinging to the side of a root below him. It gaped its mouth wide, showing row on row of teeth as pale as quartz.

The air here was richer, somehow more invigorating than anything Thomas had smelled before. It was neither warm nor cool, and carried no scent of the smoke that had choked the corridors of the warrens above.

Everywhere, wild creatures fled at their coming. Eden, Thomas thought, I am in Eden.

Lord Felph kept darting to the side of the trunk now, holding out the light as far as he could, looking down for water. They were still far from the bole of the tree, but suddenly Thomas heard a splash as something plunked into the pool at their approach, almost at their very feet.

“There!” Felph shouted. “Down there!”

He held his light high. The root they stood on was perhaps a dozen meters above water, and it shot wriggling tendrils down.

The light reflecting off the water’s surface showed gleaming patterns of ripples over the dark tree roots. Yet the pool below was clear and dark. Thomas could see minnows darting deep beneath its surface, some larger eel shape wriggling at a leisurely pace farther down-then blackness.

Lord Felph pressed the glow globe into Thomas’s hands. “Hold the light for me as I climb down.”

Thomas did as ordered. Holding the lamp would protect Felph, keep him from slipping. Thomas’s Guide allowed the action.

Felph began scrabbling down the slope of the root. He used the round holes burrowed by creatures as handholds. When he got near the bottom, he called to Thomas. “Throw down the glow globe. I can’t see handholds in this dark.”

Thomas hesitated a moment, unable to move, until he decided Felph would be safer with the light. He tossed the glow globe. Felph caught it deftly.

Felph squeezed the globe to brighten it. The waterlogged roots were dark and slippery. Felph carefully tested each step, and his journey took well over two minutes as he sought a path around various roots, climbing down in one spot, learning he’d found a false trail, then climbing to another.

Thomas began following in Felph’s trail, but in the shadows it was too difficult. He managed only to climb down partway, then crouch in a hollow, holding to a twisted knot.

Felph found a path down to one root that dipped at water’s level, providing a platform so he could reach the clear pools.

Thomas’s heart pounded. Everything had gone silent, the animals around them. No scurrying creatures. No hooting cries. It was the quiet of a forest, when wolves are on the prowl.

Sfuz, Thomas thought. He backed against a root, hid in a dark crevasse. If sfuz were coming, he didn’t want to be standing in the light, in full profile.

So pervasive was the quiet, Thomas found himself glancing up, watching roots above Felph. The globe shone its brilliant light down around the roots of the great tree, but Thomas could not see beyond that paltry circle. Everything else was in the shadows.

Thomas heard Felph grunt, followed by burbling sounds. Felph crouched on a twisted root, and dunked a canteen underwater, letting it fill.

Suddenly in the darkness, on the huge root on the far side of the pool, Thomas spotted movement. Shadows separated from a stump and moved into the light.

Thomas pointed his weapon, expecting trouble.

A young man stepped from behind a wrinkled knob of root. Thomas’s heart was pounding. Thomas considered calling out a warning, but his Guide would not let him. He’d been told to be quiet. Then Orick stepped out of the shadows behind the young man. Was this young man a friend, then? Thomas relaxed his guard.

The young man drew a pulp pistol, aimed at Felph.

Thomas would have opened fire, but his Guide forbade it. If the young man pulled the trigger in his dying throes, then Felph might get shot. Thomas would have failed in his charge to protect Felph.

Holding the pistol forward, the young man said, “Father, don’t touch that.”