Champion of Mars (31 page)

The boat pulled alongside the barge.

Waving arms welcomed Krisseos aboard.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

On the skirts of Mulympiu

W
E APPROACH A
broad valley. A shallow river runs along the bottom. We cross it and climb the hill on the other side.

Tens of thousands of spans away, a ruined city sits upon the skirts of the great mountain. Arn Vashtena. Its towers are the colour of the dust, and hard to see, but as we move closer the spires rear up and break the monotonous horizon. They are broken themselves, the grey sky of the steppe showing through the spires’ shattered fabric.

“Decay rates indicate they have not been inhabited since the end of the Third Stone War.” My voices murmur in his mind. I think he draws comfort from it, for we are cut off entirely from the Second World.

We stop for a moment to watch a herd of animals pass. They are high-shouldered, long-horned, shaggy fur stirring the heather as they lumber by.

“Stone Beasts?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I am surprised to see mundane life here.

Yoechakenon brings the awareness of the armour up. It shimmers and takes on the semblance of the steppes about us.

He runs to the city at speed, covering the distance to the walls in a few hours.

The walls were once massive, two hundred spans high and studded with defence platforms, from which thrust the muzzles of decrepit energy cannon. The majority of their circumference is cast down; only portions stand tall enough to hint at the majesty of the whole. We pass through a gap so broad it comes down almost to the ground, and go into the city.

The city had not been large. The walls, I calculate, ran for approximately twenty thousand spans. Seven town spires once stood at the centre of the settlement, of which six ragged peaks still scrape the sky. The other has collapsed, spilling a chaotic mesh of bones around it. Around the spires is a wide area of banks and mounds, covered over in dull grasses. Broken beams and struts poke through the turf, immeasurably ancient.

Yoechakenon pauses in the spires’ black shadows. They are hundreds of spans high and nearly as broad. Holes pockmark the buildings, some the height of many men. The skin is mummified and taut with age. Here and there the wreckage of an apartment or park can be made out. We can discern these only through the gashes in the spires, for, in common with all such structures made after the Second Stone War, they have no windows. The roads about the spires are buried under wind-blown loess. Access ramps, lesser buildings and tunnels are indistinguishable from each other, reduced to mounds about the spires’ feet. Only the corpses of the giant buildings remain, sentinels from a terrible age, scoured by the eternal winds of the steppe.

Yoechakenon, we are not alone,
I say.

Yoechakenon responds likewise, mind-to-mind.
I see them; in the holes in the spires. Movement. What are they?

I cannot tell, Yoechakenon, half-blind as I am, but they feel like men, although they are not.

They have not noticed us?

I do not think so. They are creatures of this world, not of the Stone Realms. They cannot penetrate the armour’s baffles.
There are no more than a dozen at present. They are moving away from us.

There is a clatter deep in the city-building. Yoechakenon’s heart quickens, and he shifts his grasp on the glaive.

What about the stacks?

There is a flicker in the spire to the right. It is faint, but it lives.
He will not allow me access if he thinks I will be in danger, so I do not tell him of the faint spirit song I hear. I must investigate. Here may be information regarding the location of the Great Librarian, and I must retrieve it or our task will fail; and I am mindful as always of my promise. Still, the song fills me with dread. I am not sure of the words it employs, but their meaning is clear.

Stay away.

Are you sure?
Yoechakenon scans the ruinous spires. They are cliffs, studded with caves.

No, I am not sure, but it is the only functioning city core. The other buildings are entirely dead.

“Then we go in.” He goes to the monumental wall of the building, seeks a tear in its fabric, and enters.

T
HE BUILDING IS
dark and stinks of slow rot. All that man built toward the end of his dominance was durable, but time wears everything away in the end. Two hundred centuries of neglect has left the spire a shell.

Yoechakenon passes through the decaying building skin and we enter a large space. The floor has fallen away, leaving a precarious tracery of half-metal bones. The largest are like ribs, arching high over an abyss whose bottom we cannot see.

Yoechakenon reaches out one hand to the wall and touches a rag of skin.
This could have been caused by energy blasts, or by the craft of the Stone Kin; even projectiles.
“It is difficult to tell, the damage is so old.” This last he says aloud. His words ring out into the dark and echo back at him, the sibilants of his voice returning as sharp as spears.

The sparse sounds of the dead spire creep back, only adding to the silence: the sound of water dripping far below, the creak of the building, the banging of its loose skin in the wind. Sinister noises, the sounds of dead places.

How do we access the spire core?
Yoechakenon speaks again mind-to-mind; even this seems like a violation of the quiet.

Directly ahead, and down. We have to find a way around this void.

Do not trouble yourself, I have a way across,
said Yoechakenon. He flips the glaive up, catching its long pole in both hands. Using it to balance, he steps onto one of the ribs and walks out over the void.

We are halfway across when the bones jolt, and begin to shift.

I use the vibrations to make a sound picture in my mind. The bones are coming away from each other. The cartilage of their intercostal spaces is friable, and our passage has made it powder. “Yoechakenon! Run!” I cry.

He leaps from falling half-metal, careening from one rib to another as they fall away behind him. They spin into the void, singing discordantly like struck wire. He comes to the last few spans at full tilt. The last rib lurches, pitching us sideways. Yoechakenon is going too fast to check his stumble, so he turns it into a leap. He bounces off a lesser bone, somersaulting as it comes free of its moorings. We land on the far side of the void. The bones fall away and hit the bottom with a clatter, unbearably loud.

We wait. There is no cry or alarm in response. No repercussions.

Yoechakenon carries on his way with more care.

Every spire has a core, a twisted spine of arteries and ropes of nerves. The core spreads its branches into every part of the building, allowing the Spiremother to care for the occupants. At its lowest reaches, the spine gathers itself into a great knot, which tapers to form the taproot. The taproot pushes deep underground, drawing minerals from the earth. Where these trailing nerves of the core come together and pierce the bedrock sit the Library stacks, a nexus of the Second World. Elsewhere on Mars, these form the network that supports the Great Library. The one here has been isolated since the loss of these lands to the Stone Kin.

It is wherein the spire’s true animi, its thinking presences, would once have dwelt – Spiremother and Spirefather. There is a glimmer of life in the core of this spire. Something lives there still. Its voice grows in volume and insistence, telling me to stay away.

We cross a maze of collapsed walls and shattered bone. Yoechakenon is forced to double back on himself many times; he will not use his glaive to cut through, for fear of drawing attention upon us. We are forced to stop twice, listening tautly, when the occasional crash the armour’s baffles are unable to hide shocks the air of this dead place. We hear no response, and proceed.

Eventually we gain the spire’s central plaza.

The central plaza of any spire is wide, and this is bigger than most; fully two thousand spans across. It stretches to the top of the structure, four thousand spans above us. It encompasses also a deep pit, sunk down to the base of the foundations. Once this would have contained an oceanic or lentic biome fringed by woodland, the centre of the spire’s internal ecology. No longer. The water has all gone.

We pause upon the empty lake edge, and I co-opt Yoechakenon’s sixth, seventh and eighth senses to search out any presences within the vicinity. It is six minutes before I speak.

“There is no sapient life here, only the spirit-flicker in the core.”

The song pulses out from the stacks, now only a short sprint away, embedded in the spire’s spine. The song has dwindled – the attention of whatever is within has moved away for the time being – but I feel its anger still. The core spine writhes up from an island in the centre of the lake, magnificent even in moribundity.

Balconies ring the spire’s centre, looking down upon what once would have been pleasant parkland. The spire’s sunpipes are not functioning, broken by war or scrubbed opaque by dusty winds. They permit only rare shafts of light to filter down, cold and grey. The park, like the rest of the building, is now but a tangle of struts and sloughed skin.

“Go cautiously.”

Yoechakenon nods his assent and sets out for the one remaining bridge from the plaza to the island around the spine. He moves silently, over the empty lake, the armour’s camouflage making of him a shadow among shadows. We reach the island without incident. About the twisted mass of the core spine is a broad court. Where time and fate have been kind, a mosaic of splintered metal tesserae shows through the filth of ages.

“Look,” says Yoechakenon. On the floor before him, face down and caked in dust and mould, are the remains of a diminutive creature.

“Human derivative,” I say. “Devolved.”

Reaching out with his glaive, Yoechakenon turns the skeleton’s head over. It has a small skull with over-large eye sockets and a feeble jaw, like that of a child. “This is like no man I have ever seen.”

“You are correct. Breathe deep.”

Yoechakenon does as he is instructed. The mask of the armour melts away, and he inhales the must of the place into his lungs. There is a pause of some seconds as I examine trace DNA on the air. I furnish him with a reconstruction of the creature – short and vicious. I lack a full sample, so employ my imagination. I make it as ugly as possible, to goad Yoechakenon to greater caution. He is too confident, and it could cost us.

The image I assemble is high-foreheaded and hairless. Bulging eyes top a tight, spiteful mouth lined with serrated teeth. Long arms depend from broad shoulders, framing a round belly.

“A degenerate, a neotenous mutant of some kind,” I say. “Perhaps specifically crafted; a construct. Who knows to what depths the inhabitants of the Stone Lands have sunk, or been forced. We are the first here for millennia.”

Yoechakenon searches the shadows, tightening his grip upon the glaive. “It is long dead, and has the seeming of a child, albeit a wicked one.”

“It is and it does,” I say.

He looks about the silent spire. “No wonder they have not shown themselves. A creature like this poses no threat.”

He walks around the spine. The door to the antechamber is a little way around from us, a pointed arch of great size embedded in the rippled dendrites of the core.

The doorway is obstructed with rotten skin, bone struts and other detritus. Yoechakenon finds another skeleton. The face of this one’s skull is split, a crude machete still grasped in its out-flung hand.

It takes Yoechakenon half an hour to shift enough detritus to make a space to crawl through. All the while I keep up my scans of the place, using his supernormal senses and the abilities of the armour. He may be ambivalent about the threat these child-men pose, but I am not.

And still there is no sign of them.

Yoechakenon forces his way through at the apex of the arch. On the other side, the debris shelves off, spilling out in a steep fan around the door, into a tunnel the width of a triumphal avenue. Yoechakenon rolls down the debris and lands with a faint clatter on the floor, glaive up. Beyond, the ground is clear.

“Lighting,” says Yoechakenon. He gestures at flickering lamps set into the wall at head height, casting a feeble glow. “The stacks live.”

“Yes,” I reply, “I can feel their pull.” I draw his attention to a set of doors at the end of the corridor, seventy or so spans away. “Beyond those doors is the antechamber.”

Other doors gape hungrily at intervals down the road, and Yoechakenon advances slowly, glaive at the ready. Some say the Stone Kin feed off the pure energies of our world, and that emanated by the spirits is an especial delicacy to them. As we progress, the decay lessens, and the lights grow steady. We reach the doors, baroque things decorated with images of blind, silent faces. They slide open soundlessly.

“The Spirefather knows we are here. It calls to me ever louder,” I say.
Be on your guard
, another of my voices adds, full of warning.
It is not as it seems.

“What was that?” asks Yoechakenon.

“My choir seeks to warn me of possible danger, but I calculate it as minimal.” I still do not tell him of the warning song. Now it has returned, it sounds in my head like distant drums.

The antechamber is lavishly appointed with things made by the most ancient crafts; simple things of natural substances, yet here, at the still-living heart of the spire, they are free of tarnish and decay.

A massive bronze face hangs from the ceiling, its eyes closed, a replica of those on the door, mouth eternally open. Rows of chairs are tiered round the room, turned to the face. Withered screens and broken projector banks are arrayed beneath it. Yoechakenon tries a few passes over control arrays, his feet crunching on shattered crystals, glass and brittle plastics. Nothing happens, and the material face of the Spirefather remains silent.

“I was hoping that maybe you would not have to directly interface with the machine. But that looks a forlorn hope now,” he says. “What if the Spirefather here is insane, or corrupt?”