Torrent

CHAPTER 25

I hadn’t needed to worry about whispering. Eleriss and Jakatra were busy pointing at us and arguing with each other in their own language.

“I don’t suppose you know what they’re saying?” Temi murmured.

I was still waiting for the final verdict on the language, but I ventured, “If I had to guess? ‘How did those idiots get down here?’”

I stepped away from the Roman to join Simon in facing Eleriss and Jakatra. A few minutes ago, I would have been relieved to see them. After hearing the soldier’s last words, I was less certain that their appearance was a good thing. What if they were the mad scientists behind everything?

The argument ended, and Jakatra strode toward us. His gaze flicked toward Temi-she’d come up to stand at our backs-but it returned to Simon, as if he were in charge. Jakatra stopped two paces from him and extended a hand, one long finger pointing between Simon’s eyes. The fact that he held his big sword in his other hand made the gesture all the more threatening. I fingered the grip of my bullwhip, though I didn’t fancy the idea of skirmishing with him again.

“You will leave now,” Jakatra said.

“We came to warn you about the creature,” I said. “It dropped in through the ceiling back there. It’s here now. Close.”

Jakatra glanced at the destroyed alcoves. “Obviously.”

“Has it attacked you? What does it want?”

“This is none of your concern. It’s-”

“Jakatra,” Eleriss whispered. He had his own weapon out, the serrated dagger, and he’d turned to face one of the dark side passages.

Jakatra sniffed the air, and he too spun in that direction. I hadn’t heard a thing yet, but their reactions told me enough. I grabbed an arrow out of my quiver and readied the bow. Rock scraped rock behind us. I whirled, expecting to see the creature charging from that direction, but it was Temi, pulling the spear out of the first alcove.

“Good idea,” Simon muttered and grabbed a katana out of the ninja’s stash.

I eyed the centurion’s sword for a second, but decided it’d be better to stick with a weapon I knew how to use. Jakatra waited in a combat stance, the sword raised to shoulder level, blade pointed forward, ready to strike.

I had no more time to think about it. A black shape charged out of the shadows of the nearest tunnel. Though Eleriss was the closest person, it blasted straight toward Jakatra.

I might have had time to loose an arrow, but I hesitated, afraid it’d turn toward me if I annoyed it, and in that split second it crossed the chamber. It had to weigh five times as much as Jakatra. A sane person would have run. He waited like a statue. At the last instant, he leaped to the side, the sword whipping around so fast it blurred.

His blow would have decapitated a lion or tiger. The sword bit into the creature’s hide, but only an inch deep. It was enough to make the creature lurch backward, a startled snarl escaping its lips.

Jakatra followed, taking several more swipes with the glowing blade. The creature batted at it with its paws, but its strikes seemed slow in comparison. Or maybe it was that Jakatra was so fast-his movements were hard to follow. One moment he was in the predator’s face, slashing at its eyes, and the next he’d hopped over its lunging reach, landing on its shoulder to run down its back, stabbing and cutting every step of the way.

During a rare moment when there were a few feet of space between Jakatra and the creature, Temi threw her spear. It struck one of the sleek black haunches and bounced off. The creature didn’t notice; it merely lunged at Jakatra.

Feeling I should be attempting to help as well, I loosed an arrow the next time the combatants were separated. It struck the creature’s shoulder, but also bounced off. Again, if it noticed, it wasn’t apparent.

“Stop throwing your worthless weapons at it,” Jakatra said. “They cannot damage it.”

I flushed. I’d understood that but had thought we might at least distract it. But if he didn’t want help…

I met Eleriss’s eyes on the other side of the fight, and his expression was surprisingly sympathetic. Maybe he’d heard similar commands from his comrade. He remained in a ready position, his dagger at the ready, but it didn’t appear to have any special properties, not like the sword.

Jakatra lunged in, feinting a frontal assault only to duck under a swiping paw to slash his sword at the side of the beast’s ribcage, if it had a ribcage.

The creature howled, a high-pitched noise that reminded me more of a siren than an animal’s cry. It sounded like frustration rather than pain. Jakatra didn’t have its strength or bulk or armored hide, but the predator couldn’t land a blow on him. I was reminded again that whatever he was, he wasn’t entirely human.

Jakatra eluded a lunging attack and leaped straight up, somersaulting over the monster’s head before landing on its back. He’d twisted in midair, then slammed the sword down onto the creature’s neck, right below its skull. It should have been a killing blow, and indeed another high-pitched yowl burst forth from its mouth, but it reared and shook him off. Jakatra was flung several feet, and I raised the bow, fearing the monster would charge him when he landed.

But the creature howled again, then whirled and loped toward the nearest tunnel. Jakatra ran after it, stabbing it once more with the blade and drawing another cry. The monster only ran faster and soon outdistanced him.

Eleriss called out, his tone one of urgency and command. Jakatra slowed to a trot and stopped before he could disappear into the tunnel after the creature. He spewed a few sentences full of clipped words back at Eleriss, who merely shrugged and waved for him to return.

Something black had fallen to the ground during the fight. It took me a moment to realize it was Jakatra’s wool cap-he’d lost it somewhere amidst the somersaults and being hurled off the creature’s back. He had a ponytail of dark blond hair-we’d known that-and he also had-I stared-a pair of pointed ears. The bottom halves were as normal as any person’s, but the tops… yes, they were distinctly pointed.

“Do you see…?” I whispered.

“I see,” Simon whispered back.

“What are they?” Temi breathed.

Jakatra stalked over, grabbed his cap, and stuffed it into his pocket. He looked more defiant than mortified that his… unique cranial features had been revealed.

“We can damage the jibtab,” Eleriss explained to our group without acknowledging Jakatra’s bare head, “but it is, as you saw, a battle of attrition.”

“To kill it will take a great many blows. We must set a trap for it,” Jakatra said, speaking to his comrade and ignoring us, though he did deign to use English.

“Unfortunately, the jibtab is clever.”

I decided not to mention that we were only down here because it had trapped us.

Simon raised a hand. “We’re good at setting traps.”

Jakatra gave him a disdainful sneer, said something in his own language, and stalked up the chamber to study each of the alcoves in turn.

“What’d he say?” Simon asked Eleriss.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

“My comrade observed that you are holding that weapon incorrectly if you wish to use it.” Eleriss pointed to the katana.

Somehow I doubted the original words had been as politic.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain these dead people,” I said.

“No,” Eleriss said. “You must leave now. Forget what you’ve seen.”

“We’d be happy to, but the door’s been locked.”

Eleriss tilted his head.

“The creature shoved a boulder over the tunnel entrance,” I said. “We’d need you to burn a new hole to the surface for us to leave.”

As soon as I said it, a part of me wished I hadn’t given him the idea. He might boot us out right that moment, and I was more curious than ever about what was going on down here. Especially now that we were standing next to someone who could hold off the creature…

I frowned at the train of thought. Not five minutes ago, a dying man had pointed at Jakatra and Eleriss and said not to let them enslave us. I couldn’t let myself think we were safe around them.

“There is no time for that,” Jakatra said from behind me.

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him approach. Temi, too, looked surprised and took a step back from him. No longer so intrigued after she’d heard the centurion’s dying words?

“These are all dead,” Jakatra continued, ignoring us. His words were for Eleriss. “We should not have bypassed-” He glanced at us, then finished speaking in his own language.

“We must reach the last station before the jibtab,” Eleriss said, striding toward one of the tunnels, not the one the creature had chosen.

Jakatra fell into step at his side.

I shrugged at my comrades, and they shrugged back. With few other options, we jogged to catch up with them. They’d have to get out when they were done doing whatever it was they were doing, and that’d be our chance to escape as well.

The tunnel we entered was wide enough for Temi, Simon, and me to walk side by side, though the floor had the evenness of a rock slide, and we had to scramble up and down lumpy hills. Temi kept up, but sweat soon bathed her brow.

“What happens if he turns that sword on us?” she whispered.

“No point in killing us now,” Simon said. “We can be cannon fodder for them.”

“Any theory on the ears?” I murmured. I’d been waiting for Simon to triumphantly exclaim that his hypothesis had been correct and that Star Trek aliens were real.

“We already knew they weren’t human, at least not entirely,” Simon said. “From the blood sample.”

“I’m surprised you’re not eager to proclaim them Vulcans.”

“Vulcans have green blood.”

Not to mention being make believe…

“All right, then what has red blood and pointed ears?” I asked. “The experiment of some mad scientist who happens to be a Gene Roddenberry fan?”

“I was thinking elves,” Simon whispered.

“Elves? Come on, this isn’t RealmSaga.”

“No? That elf is toting a magical sword around.”

I jostled him as we clambered up a bumpy slope. “Please.”

“What, they didn’t make you take mythology as part of your degree?” Simon asked. “Elves come up in a lot of cultures’ old stories.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “They were one of the misbegotten creatures mentioned in Beowulf, and they were all over Norse mythology, not to mention that they star on cookie boxes these days. Perhaps we should ask those two if they bake chocolate-covered shortbread treats from a kitchen inside a tree?”

Up ahead, Jakatra and Eleriss exchanged glances. I had a feeling our whispers weren’t as soft as we’d like, so I dropped the conversation. Temi had fallen behind. I slowed down to wait for her. Just because the creature had given up for the moment didn’t mean it wouldn’t try for Jakatra again-or take out its fury on some easier prey along the way.

Temi waved for us to go on. “I’ll catch up.”

I waited anyway, adding my flashlight’s beam to her own to better illuminate her path. Simon waited too.

The glow of Jakatra’s sword faded from sight when he turned a bend. The passage was a lot darker with only the power of our flashlights to drive back the blackness.

Temi caught up, and we started again, only to halt when a bright yellow warmth bled into the tunnel from around that bend.

“What’s that?” I asked. “More than the sword.” It was as if a bank of lights had been turned on.

“Let’s find out.” Temi urged us forward.

Despite my resolution to wait for her, I found myself jogging at the end. If there were more people in alcoves, I felt obligated to try and help them before the monster found them and attacked. Or before our pointy-eared friends did something to them. Who knew if their plans were any friendlier than those of the creature?

I rounded the bend ahead of the others, entering a chamber of alcoves like the first one, except that a couple of impressive stalactites dangled from the ceiling with water dripping from their tips. The rivulets ran down the slope, filling a pool in front of a striated wall. A round oval on the ceiling was acting like a light fixture, shedding powerful illumination that pushed the shadows from every corner of space. It also brightened the four alcoves, these with the stone columns still framing their entrances. I picked out another Roman, this one from an earlier era, a Mongol warrior, a Celt in chain mail, and a Spartan hoplite in crimson chiton and cloak with a spear, shield, and short sword. We hadn’t seen anyone from a period later than 150 °CE or so. No suitable warriors to select from in recent centuries? Or was someone a fan of the earlier time periods?

At the moment, the men appeared like statues, though their feet dangled a foot above the stone floor, their bodies suspended in midair. Their eyes were closed, as if they slept. Eleriss had gone to the end and waved his hand, causing an oval that I could only guess was a control panel to protrude an inch. It was made from the same limestone as the cavern wall and blended seamlessly. If there’d been a similar panel in the other chamber, I hadn’t noticed it.

Jakatra waved at the first two men, made a disgusted sound, and spoke a few words in his own tongue.

Trying not to draw their attention, I sidled closer. I paused to consider the last man more thoroughly, not only because he had a handsome face-I could imagine some sculptor trying to get him to stand still in pre-photography days to capture his prominent cheekbones and strong jaw-but because he might be some ancestor of mine. Well, probably not-my grandparents claimed they could trace our family’s heritage all the way back to the scholars and philosophers of Athens, people who probably would have sniffed in disdain at Sparta’s militaristic isolationism. Still, we had the country in common. If he’s real, I reminded myself. Then I shook my head because I had no idea what “real” would mean. These couldn’t possibly be actual human beings who’d been snatched from different periods of history. They had to be a part of someone’s modern science experiment. Fakes.

Yeah? Then why had that fake Roman spoken real Latin?

“Stand back,” Eleriss said.

He was talking to me. He stood before his control panel, a hand raised. Jakatra had returned to the tunnel mouth-it seemed to be the only entrance leading into this chamber, though Simon was poking around in a giant alcove on the wall opposite of the smaller ones. Temi was waiting near the tunnel as well, the old spear still in her grip. Simon leaned closer to examine something on a stone wall. Maybe he’d found the laboratory. I ought to go check, but I wanted to see these men returned to life, if that was what Eleriss intended. I took my step back and waited.

He lifted both hands to the panel and tapped against it, as if he were typing on a keyboard-except that I couldn’t see any keys. I might have moved in for a better look, but something was happening inside the chambers. Light seeped out of the sides, and thanks to Simon’s mention of cryonics, I thought of a heat lamp thawing slabs of frozen meat. It wasn’t as if there were ice crystals glittering on the men’s eyelashes, but the image persisted.

The lights winked out in the first two alcoves first. The men dropped like rocks and pitched forward face-first.

Though I’d already stepped back, I jumped back farther. They didn’t move.

Jakatra said something that I interpreted as, “I told you so,” and Eleriss’s, “Kss tess” might have been an, “I know.”

“Those two… didn’t make it?” I asked.

“It has been centuries since these units were serviced,” Eleriss said. “Mechanical failure is unfortunate but expected after such inattention.”

“Centuries?” I mouthed and met Temi’s eyes. She shrugged back at me. I would have shared incredulous looks with Simon, too, but he’d figured out how to turn on a light-or perhaps it had simply come on automatically at his presence-and didn’t seem to be paying attention to what was going on out here.

“Are you saying that these are human beings that were taken from their people for-” my mind cringed away from the word experimentation, “-some reason and frozen here until they were needed again?”

“Frozen?” Eleriss asked.

“Yeah, like cryonics.”

Eleriss said a few words to Jakatra and received a one-word response.

“Oh, no, that would require extensive repair to tissues,” Eleriss said. “This process is different.”

“Care to explain it?”

“Your language lacks the words.”

“Words can be combined and altered to have new meanings. You could try to explain it.”

“Your people also lack the… foundation to understand,” Eleriss said.

My fingers were clenched into fists. I forced them to unwind. What was I going to do? Punch him for calling humans stupid? I didn’t necessarily disagree; I just found his answers more frustrating than silence.

“Is it possible,” Temi asked, “that the others died that way as well? That they were already dead when the creature came, and that they didn’t… suffer?”

I grimaced, understanding the question. Though the Roman had clearly not been dead beforehand, it’d be easier to stomach the grisly treatment of the others if we could believe they’d died long ago.

“No,” Eleriss said, apparently not one to lie, even if it would make a woman feel better. “Those chambers were all functioning adequately. In reflection, we should have woken those people first, but they were…” He glanced at Jakatra, as if wondering if he’d said too much.

Jakatra was listening, but he didn’t glower or shake his head this time. That made me uneasy. Why did I have the feeling he thought we’d already learned too much, and it didn’t matter what else was said, because he wasn’t planning on letting us out of this place? I eyed the alcoves, wondering if they could be reused. The centurion’s warning ran through my mind again.

“They were the worst criminals,” Eleriss continued. “It is unlikely we could have worked with any of them.”

“The worst?” I asked. “Are you saying these were all criminals?”

“Yes.”

“What were their crimes?”

“Sabotage. Torture. Murder.”

“Then why were they preserved?” I was no longer certain I wanted to feel a sense of kinship with the Spartan. “Why weren’t they hung or quartered or whatever they did back then?”

“It is not our people’s way to kill if there is a viable alternative.” Eleriss glanced at Jakatra, or maybe he was looking at the tunnel.

“Your people.” I had about a thousand questions, including one asking who the heck his people were, but I was still trying to wrap my mind around these hibernating men. “Why would your people have chosen their punishment when they’re human beings? They are human beings, aren’t they?”

“They are, but their crimes were against my people.”

“Centuries ago?” I massaged the back of my neck. Was he saying that his people had been here, on Earth, hundreds of years ago? I glanced at the Spartan. Make that thousands of years ago.

“Yes.”

Jakatra said something and pointed at the Celt and the Spartan.

“Yes,” Eleriss said, “I will try.”

“Are these the least worst of the criminals?” I asked. It was stupid-the Spartan should be no different to me than any of the others-but I wanted him not to be a murderer.

Eleriss hesitated. “No. We went to those men first, but their units had also failed.” He turned his back to me, as if to say he was done answering questions, and typed on the invisible keyboard again.

I was watching the Spartan, so I almost failed to notice the walls light up in the Celt’s alcove. They highlighted a ruddy face beneath a thick red beard and a squashed nose that had been broken a time or two. He had a barrel chest beneath his chain mail and a golden torc gleamed about his neck. His stout legs were clad in plaid trousers and, and he gripped an iron long sword before him. I happened to be looking at his face when his eyes popped open. They were a vivid green that would have been captivating, but there was a wildness about them that repelled me.

His feet hit the ground and the clear barrier that contained the alcoves faded away. He burst from the chamber with a roar. Even if I’d studied his language, I doubt I would have understood him. He brandished his sword, spun around the room, his eyes searching but not seemingly seeing or focusing until he spotted me. Then he charged.

I backpedaled and tripped over the uneven ground. He raised his sword, his eyes full of deadly intent.

I rolled away as it descended and scrabbled for my bullwhip. I had a vague notion of snapping it around his hilt and yanking the weapon free, but that might be a hopeless fantasy-I’d settle for not being hewn in half.

Metal squealed against metal. By the time I scrambled to my feet-it couldn’t have taken more than a second-Jakatra was battling the man. The Celt’s roars continued, cries full of rage and fear. I sensed that he hadn’t seen me for a human being and that he wasn’t seeing Jakatra properly either. I had absolutely no idea what to do with that information.

With that wicked glowing blade, Jakatra lopped the long sword off above the cross-guard. The metal blade banged as it struck the stone floor, but the Celt didn’t stop his attack. He tore out a belt knife and lunged at Jakatra.

I looked at Eleriss, hoping he had some backup plan, a tranquilizer or something. His shoulders were slumped in sadness-or defeat.

Though I’d seen Jakatra’s agility against the creature, the Celt was pushing him back with his unrelenting fury and rage. That dagger came close to drawing blood. Jakatra’s face remained calm, and even though his back approached a wall, I thought he could handle himself. Indeed, he nodded as if he’d been contemplating some great decision. I didn’t guess what it might be until he parried a dagger attack and then, his body and arms moving impossibly fast, drove the curving edge of his sword into the Celt’s chest.