Alien Chronicles 3 - The Crystal Eye (34 page)

“Oh, no!” he said. “Get them. Get them!”

“No time,” she said. “Go to the wall.”

“But—”

“Hurry!”

She grabbed some of the items from him as others scattered across the ground. He was yelling at her in protest, stumbling over his own feet, and she had to shove him hard to keep him moving.

At the wall, she dropped what she was carrying onto the ground and stripped off her travel jerkin. Scooping up the data crystals and miniature volumes, she piled them on top of the garment.

“Do the same with yours,” she said. “Hurry! The guards will be sweeping through here at any minute.”

“But I saw none. The security screens were on, and there wasn’t anyone coming in when I left,” Prynan said while he piled his treasures onto his robe. He picked up some that she’d dropped. “You’re being far too careless. Have you any idea—”

“We’ll get the rest later,” she said. Something was wrong. She couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t smell anything, yet the fur was standing up on her neck. An instinctive growl rumbled in her throat.

She rolled up her jerkin and tossed it over the wall, then did the same with Prynan’s robe.

He climbed awkwardly, and she boosted him too hard, jamming his face into the stone and making him grunt with pain. On top of the wall, Hoptwith grabbed Prynan’s arm and pulled him the rest of the way. Ampris jumped, and they both caught her arm and pulled while she scrambled, panting desperately, to the top.

Just as she reached it, she heard a low, ominous noise that swelled rapidly. Then an explosion rumbled through the ground, shaking the wall and toppling more of the ruins. A great orange belch of fire burst through the open doorway they had exited, blazing up the stairwell into the night sky and filling the darkness with noise and heat and terrible light.

The force of it knocked Ampris off the wall, along with Hoptwith and Prynan. She fell hard, her ears ringing, her eyes blinded. The wall shook, and for a dazed second she thought it might collapse on top of her.

The ground was still quaking. Ampris knew she needed to move. There was something important she had to do, but she could not seem to shake off the ringing and the darkness. Her body felt heavy and liquid, not under her control.

She felt a sensation of wet, and slowly realized she was being dragged into the water. The smell of the river came to her, filthy and strong. Her head went under. She struggled, and came to the surface, gasping and floundering.

Rubbing her eyes, she managed to focus blurrily. Giant flames blazed skyward above the wall. Debris was raining down steadily, hitting her. She sank lower in the water, and a hand gripped her arm and tugged her along, towing her to safety.

A long while later, when dawn was slowly breaking over the city and the fire still raged in the old section of the palace, Ampris knelt on the riverbank under the drooping branches of a dying tree. Its roots, exposed by the erosion of the bank, were knotted and hard. Her hearing was coming back, although her ears still rang, and she had painful flash burns on her arms and one side of her head.

Those would heal.

Prynan had a broken wrist. Quiesl had sprained his ankle and was hobbling about painfully. They had made a little inventory of what they’d saved, and when the black wooden box that Ampris had picked up at the last moment off a table in the galley was revealed, Prynan had cried out and flung himself at her, weeping against her neck.

“You saved it,” he cried. “You saved it.”

The box contained a book, a strange artifact she had never seen before. It was a slim volume with pages of fine vellum bound on one edge and wrapped in leather. It was the journal of Nithlived the mother, and Nithlived the daughter, and Nithlived the granddaughter, all warrior-priestesses, all members of the great Heva clan. It contained their writings, much of which could no longer be deciphered, as most of the Aaroun alphabet and ancient languages had been lost in time, but it was the only record of their thoughts and wisdom now in existence.

“I couldn’t find it with the Histories,” Prynan explained, still sobbing. “I looked and looked for it, thinking it was misshelved. I’d forgotten about taking it upstairs to be cleaned.”

He went on weeping, and gently Ampris held him. They all looked ready to cry with him. The sadness and bleak horror in their faces was not for themselves or for the home they’d lost, but for the fact that Israi, in her need for retaliation, had destroyed the Imperial Archives just to punish them. All the history, all the knowledge and information stored there, was now gone forever.

Ampris stared across the river at the city of Vir, its spires and rooftops gilded with the rising sun, and her heart felt cold and small with amazement. Israi embodied the supreme ignorance of her race. For not just the records of the abiru people had been wiped out, but also all that was Viis. Israi could have saved her empire had she accessed the information stored beneath her own palace floors. Instead, she had destroyed it.

Truly, the empire was now doomed.

CHAPTER
•FOURTEEN

By the time Nashmarl reached the gates of Vir, he didn’t much care anymore.

Coated with dust, footsore, and wishing he’d never tagged along with Foloth on this adventure, Nashmarl had been excited the first time he saw what looked like the city rising up through the shimmering waves of heat.

But it turned out to be nothing but a fueling station.

The next day, Foloth jabbed him in the ribs and pointed excitedly. “Look!” he shouted. “There it is! There it is!”

But that turned out to be Port Filea, the spaceport servicing Vir. Oh, it was wondrous enough, with its tall communications towers, the revolving solar chargers, the glass-encased terminal curved like a comet’s tail. The port was like a hive of insects, with workers in orange coveralls going in all directions. Ground-space shuttles—amazing craft shaped like needles—landed and took off almost constantly. The tremendous, ground-shaking booms as they entered or exited the sound barrier frightened Nashmarl at first, but Foloth stood at the perimeter fence with his face tilted up to the sky, eyes squinted against the sun as he followed the trajectory of a takeoff.

“Beautiful,” he said.

Yes, Nashmarl agreed it was beautiful, but the place was also loud, deafening him not just with the sonic booms but also with blaring sirens, and voices channeled through loudspeakers, and screaming brakes, and roaring engines, and the clackety rhythm of the cargo haulers and the passenger trams. Everything went too fast. It was too much to see, all at once.

Then the sniffer found them, and suddenly it was blaring right over their heads: “Warning! You are too close to the security boundary. Step back six paces. Warning! You are too close to the security boundary.”

Nashmarl turned and ran, certain that the authorities would be coming to pick them up at any moment. Foloth, who had almost touched the fence, turned and strolled away in a big show of bravado that didn’t impress Nashmarl at all.

It took three more days of walking to reach Vir, three days of choking on the dust tossed up by transports and other freight traffic. The cargo haulers were the worst. They were slow-moving and almost skimmed the ground with a full load. The exhaust they belched choked Nashmarl and made him long to be back in the mountains, breathing the clean, narpine-scented air. Sometimes they had to abandon the road and hide themselves when patrollers went by. That slowed them down, and the rations they’d stolen from Harthril’s shelter the night they left were starting to run out.

There was nothing to hunt; all the vegetation looked burned up by the sun and dead. Panting in the heat, feeling his head throbbing beneath his hood, which was almost smothering him, Nashmarl wanted to go home.

Foloth glared at him. “Don’t be stupid. We’ve come too far to turn back. Besides, we’re almost there.”

“And what’re we going to eat when we get there?” Nashmarl asked. “There’s no hunting in a city.”

“You have the brains of a
worm,”
Foloth told him. “We’re Viis. We’ll be fed just like everyone else.”

Nashmarl gritted his teeth and forced himself to keep up with Foloth’s pace. “We’re half-Viis,” he said. “Who’s going to give us food?”

“The same people who give away food to the Rejects. It’s a law or something. They have to take care of us.”

Nashmarl couldn’t believe the confidence he heard in Foloth’s voice. “No one
has
to take care of us,” he said. “We ain’t even Rejects.”

“Aren’t,” Foloth corrected him. “Say ‘aren’t.’ ”

“Why?”

“Because you’re Viis. You mustn’t talk like the abiru folk.”

“I
am
abiru!” Nashmarl shouted. “Mother is abiru, and that makes us both—”

“Viis blood is stronger than Aaroun,” Foloth said. He pointed. “Look, Nashmarl. There is Vir.”

Nashmarl was looking at his feet, at the puffs of dust fogging around his ankles with every step. “Vir is a fable,” he said stubbornly. “Made up. It doesn’t exist.”

Foloth shoved him, nearly knocking him off his feet. “There! Look at it.”

Nashmarl looked, and there before him was a vast, sprawling metropolis shimmering as though a mirage. Mother had told them Vir was a large place, but nothing had prepared him for the immense size of it. It stretched on and on across the horizon, bordered on one side by a brown muddy river. He had seen towns before, but even if they were all placed together, they would not be this big. He stared, his mouth hanging open, and felt suddenly small and insignificant in the scheme of life. He was frightened as well, but Foloth was hurrying on. Slowly, Nashmarl followed.

They walked all day, camped in a dry ditch off the road far away from some other travelers who looked like dangerous cutthroats, and walked another half-day before they reached the city gates.

The walls, built of pale stone, towered tall and straight. Beyond the walls, Nashmarl could see buildings of fabulous shapes looming up even taller. Airborne traffic swarmed in all directions, glinting in the sunlight. Patrollers wearing black body armor and carrying side-arms had a checkpoint station at the gates themselves. More patrollers stood atop the walls, which were also fitted with scanners and other surveillance devices. Sniffers floated here and there.

Nashmarl and Foloth ducked off the road to avoid getting run down by the heavy traffic going in and out. Nashmarl tried to follow his brother, but he kept finding himself standing still and simply staring. Nothing had prepared him for this. The size, the noise, the congestion all overwhelmed his senses. He realized he and Foloth should have never come here. They had no chance at all of finding Mother in a place like this, no matter what Foloth said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Foloth asked, jolting him from his thoughts. “Come on!”

Nashmarl shook his head. “I have a bad feeling. We’ll get lost in there.”

Foloth’s dark eyes narrowed. “Do you think I’m going to turn back now? After we’ve walked all this way? We’re here, Nashmarl!”

“I don’t care,” Nashmarl said. “I don’t think we should go in there.”

“I am going,” Foloth said in a cold, tight voice. “And you are going.”

Nashmarl took warning from his tone and whirled to run, but Foloth tackled him from behind and knocked him flat. Sitting on Nashmarl’s back, he mashed his face into the hot dirt.

“Enough of this,” he said. “I never expected my brother to be a coward.”

Anger made Nashmarl lift his head despite Foloth’s efforts to hold it down. “Not a coward!” he said, spitting out a mouthful of dirt.

“Afraid of the big city,” Foloth taunted him.

“Not—”

“Afraid.
Afraid!”

Nashmarl flailed and struggled, finally managing to dislodge Foloth from on top of him. Squirming around, he caught Foloth and hit him, but Foloth shoved him back and kicked him.

The kick caught Nashmarl in his thigh muscle and hurt enough to make him yell.

“Baby,” Foloth said.

Nashmarl’s pride was hurt now. He scrambled to his feet, coated in dirt, and glared at his brother. “I am not a baby, and I am not afraid,” he said breathlessly. “I just don’t think we can find Mother in a place this big.”

“The baby wants his mother,” Foloth taunted him.

Rage flared in Nashmarl. Yelling, he ran at Foloth and butted him with his head, knocking his brother flat on his back and flailing away at him until Foloth managed to shove him off.

“Stop it!” Foloth shouted at him. “If you felt like this, why did you wait until now to mention it? Why did you come at all? Eating my rations. Wasting my time. I’m better off without you.”

Giving Nashmarl a look of disgust, Foloth turned his back and marched away.

Nashmarl got to his feet and realized Foloth was heading for the gates without him. He couldn’t walk back to camp by himself. And he knew that if Foloth ever vanished into the city without him, he would never see his brother again.

Alarmed, Nashmarl muttered a curse and hurried after Foloth. “Wait!”

Foloth never slowed down. But when Nashmarl caught up with him, he said, “Thought you weren’t coming.”

Nashmarl glared at him and didn’t answer. Foloth always had to rub it in.

They joined the end of a line of other people on foot, mostly Gorlican traders who had to hand over their cargo manifests personally in order to get through. A Viis male garbed in dirt-colored clothing and towing a line of half-grown abiru in chains gave the cubs a hard look.

Nashmarl pulled his hood farther over his face, and felt suddenly nervous. “Is he a slaver?” he whispered to Foloth.

Foloth started to stare at the Viis, but Nashmarl gripped his arm. “Don’t stare at him. Don’t attract his attention.”

“He’s already looking at us,” Foloth whispered.

“Cleared,” the patroller checking papers said in a bored voice, and the slaver gathered his property together, whipping them forward with short, quick slashes.

Someone behind the cubs growled and gave them a shove. Nashmarl stumbled forward, tugging his hood even farther forward. A fresh worry occurred to him. “We don’t have any papers,” he whispered. “No—”

“Abiru?” the patroller said to them without glancing up. He reached behind him and picked up a handheld scanner. “Hold out your arms.”