Primordium, p.10
Primordium, page 10
On top of many of the pillars, individual huts perched like storks’ nests. The bridges at that end could be raised or lowered to provide access, with platforms between that might be used by all. Here, I counted four layers of bridges, houses, platforms—denser and denser toward the center of the village, where, finally, the dwellings merged.
In the gloom beneath, stairs, ladders, and ropes descended to other docks. I saw no bodies, no evidence of fighting—but also heard no voices nor any of the sounds of a living town. Just the regular lapping of the salty waves.
Then Vinnevra gasped. Something long and pale passed beneath us, a wide, greenish cloud like smoke in the dark water. She scrambled up onto the dock and I quickly followed, hauling Gamelpar with me. This time I caused him pain and he cried out, then pushed away, balancing on one leg, while I reached down and snatched his stick from the boat. The boat drifted, so I kneeled, groaning at the thought of leaning out over the water, and grabbed one side. “We need some way to tie it up.”
“I’ll stay here and tend to it,” Vinnevra said, glancing calmly enough into the water—once again clear and dark through its depths. She preferred whatever had passed below, or its companions, to what we might find up above.
“Not a good idea,” I said. “You’ll come with us.”
My concern was twofold. I worried about her safety, but I also worried that she might give in to her compulsion and leave us stranded out here. I didn’t trust her change in mood—or whatever might be causing it.
Fortunately, on the opposite side of the dock, a wooden bracket was hung with several ropes left to dangle in the water. Gamelpar pulled one up with his stick and soon we had the boat secured, then all of us climbed the steep steps to a hatch in the lowermost platform.
Gamelpar, I learned, was quite capable of scaling such steps, as long as he took the climb slowly, braced his stick on the treads, and used it for balance.
Through the hatch, we emerged on a wide, railed platform about twenty meters across, connected to other platforms and a few enclosed shacks—for at this level, still in the shadows, they were little more than that: places to store things or dwellings for the poor.
I crossed several bridges, looking into the shacks, and found emptiness—neither inhabitants nor food.
“They were all taken away,” Vinnevra said.
Had the humans here been worth fighting over? I wondered. What else could cause Forerunners to battle each other in such an insignificant place?
Surely the humans hadn’t killed them!
We climbed still higher, ladder and stairs and more ladders, until we reached a narrow round turret atop a central stone pillar, slender and, I thought, naturally six-sided rather than hewn—if anything could be natural here.
Gamelpar watched from below.
Wind blew through Vinnevra’s tight orange-brown curls as we walked around the turret together. From here, we could see out over the entire complex.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said. “It’s fading.”
“What’s fading?”
“My sense of direction. Something’s changed again—back there, out there. But I just wanted to say—I really don’t like it here.”
“Not a warning from your geas?”
“No. I hardly feel anything about that. I don’t even see the Lady.” She shook her head. “I’m of little use now to anybody.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “We know where to go, because of you.”
“You know where not to go,” she corrected.
“Just as useful, don’t you think?”
She pointed toward the largest building, a peaked pentagram supported by five roughly equidistant pillars, each about twenty meters apart. Their blunt tips poked through the perimeter of the roofline, forming a truly impressive central hall—or the dwelling of some powerful leader.
“Over there?” she asked.
I traced and mapped the bridges with a darting finger. “Maybe,” I said.
“You might actually learn what happened here,” she said, her voice low.
“What do you sense?”
“Nothing good,” she said. “Can you hear it? Above the waves and the wind.”
I cupped my hands over my ears and directed them toward the pentagram hall. For a moment, I heard nothing—and then, something heavy slammed inside the building, making the bridges sway. We held on to the turret rail and kept very still, like hunted animals, but nothing so loud followed.
I looked down and saw Gamelpar frozen in place just like us, facing the direction of that hall.
Then I heard—or imagined I heard—other, softer sounds coming from within the plank walls. Sounds not unlike the lapping of the waves, but more prolonged, and only slightly less liquid.
Vinnevra pushed back from the rail. “Something’s in there,” she said. “Something odd and very unhappy.”
I had been around this girl—no longer really a girl in my eyes—for long enough to feel the hair on my neck and arms bristle. I descended from the turret, Vinnevra close behind.
“Do we go and look?” I asked him.
Gamelpar said, “We’ve come this far. We’re obviously none of us here for our health.”
Somehow, that also struck me as blasphemous. But these deep emotions were being challenged both by fear and by the unspoken attitudes of the Lord of Admirals—who had no such sentimental perspective about the Lifeshaper.
We followed several bridges, moving in a broken spiral to the central hall. Finally, we gathered on a walkway that ran completely around the hall, and circled the perimeter until we came to a broad, high double door. The frame of the door was ornamented with blocky, simple carvings of leering faces, fruits, animals—and what looked like wolves or dogs.
At the peak of the door frame, one very convincing ape looked down upon us—like those great black beasts said to be found in the northern highlands back on Erde-Tyrene, half a dream’s distance from Marontik.
I studied this oddly peaceful-looking visage. Had it been carved from life?
Gamelpar nudged my leg with his stick, and I pushed one side of the door. It swung in with a mournful groan.
The smell that came out of that hall was indescribable, not the smell of death—not rot and decay—but a thickened stench of endless fear and life gone desperately wrong. The door’s creaking opening was followed by more fluid-slopping sounds from deep inside, curiously muffled as if by thick curtains.
Vinnevra and Gamelpar were driven back by the smell—and perhaps by the sound. Gamelpar held out his stick and gently pushed Vinnevra farther away, giving me a look that said with no uncertainty, only you and I will enter that place. My daughter of daughters will stay here.
“Gamelpar—,” she began, and I heard in her tone fear of being alone out here, of having no one to keep her from her compulsion, should it return, no one to cross the wide salty water with her … no one left on this broken wheel that she knew and trusted or loved.
But the old man would not be dissuaded. “You will stay here,” he said. He nudged my shoulder with his hand. “You first,” he said.
This was neither a joke nor any sign of cowardice. We were entering the kind of place, perhaps, where things were more likely to come upon one from behind. Things not truly alive … failed gods from old times, bitter and dusty; the ghosts of our ancestral enemies, outside human emotion, simply wound up to hunt and gibber along through the darkness …
Why I thought of these things I do not know, but I was reasonably certain Gamelpar was thinking the same things. We were both far beyond any personal experience of what lies behind the apparently solid and real.
I had hoped the Lord of Admirals would provide some helpful comment, some guiding memory, but he seemed to have retreated completely, as a snail draws in its horns at the shadow of a great, pecking bird.…
A snail that knows its death is near.
We entered the hall.
FOURTEEN
AT SUCH MOMENTS, the day is never long enough, and there is no time to regret prior delays, dawdling, not paddling fast enough, or taking so long to pick out the proper pieces of bark for the job.
Light still filtered through gaps and chinks in the roof and walls, revealing a series of open cells, some round, some square, all visible two or three meters below where we stood, at the top of a flight of curved stairs. But that light was rapidly dimming. The long shadow of the edge wall was coming, even here, many kilometers inland—and soon Halo night would be upon us.
“A few minutes of light left,” I whispered to Gamelpar.
“Quick in, quick out,” he said.
We descended the steps. These cells might have once been places of sleep, or drinking, or eating—or just places where tinkers performed their duties. They were too close-packed to be any sort of reasonable collection of market stalls.
And wrapped in deeper gloom at the center of the hall stood a large cage, five or six meters high, and twice as wide. Somehow, I did not believe humans had made such a cage—even in the darkness, there was a regularity, a craftsmanship, to the vertical wall of bars, as well as bluish tint. Keeping close, we followed a narrow, sinuous corridor toward the cage.
I glanced into several of the cells and saw chairs, small tables, shelves—tools and piled supplies of bark, wood, leather. The craftsmen were not in evidence, nor was there any sign—other than the leering faces on the door frame—what sort of humans these might have been.
In a few dreadful minutes, we were close to the cage, and the failing light only hinted at what waited within: a great lump of shadow, big as ten or twelve men piled upon each other—a pile of corpses, then? Some of the inhabitants, taken here, left behind, forgotten?
But the smell had not been of death.
Tiny glints of phosphorescence seemed to flit around the mass, like fireflies on a hot grassland evening—provoking a shiver, a hint of slow, uncertain motion.
“One of the lake creatures,” I said softly. “A great fish, or something else, dragged up and left here!”
Gamelpar kept his eyes fixed on the mass, through the bars, and neither responded to my theory, nor moved in any way. He had become still as a statue.
Then his eye shifted the barest degree, and met mine, and something passed between our old spirits—nothing complex.
Simple recognition.
The Lord of Admirals had seen such a thing before.
It’s a Gravemind, he told me, and illustrated that enigmatic description with a quick series of memories I could only half-interpret.
Before either of us—Gamelpar or me—had a chance to understand, the mass made a sudden, spasmodic movement, and its entire surface became a net of orange and green fire—crawling veins of light, literally veins! Like glowing, burning blood vessels on the body of a flayed beast—and yet not one beast, not one animal flayed and arranged in this mass, but many, many—dozens! And not human, too large of limb and torso to be human.
Not the mashed-together, former inhabitants of this water-locked village …
Instead, we were seeing a mass of Forerunners—Warrior-Servants or others of that kind, I thought, but there was no way to know for sure. They had been gathered up as if by some monstrous sculptor and molded and melted into each other like living clay, but more horrible yet—some still had heads, torsos, faces, and some of those faces could look outward, through the bars, and were watching us with faintly glowing eyes.
The mass flinched again, making the entire building shudder beneath our feet.
Then came the voices, soft at first, gradually coalescing, many voices in one, but the words poorly coordinated, spread out and blurred into an awful, cacophonic lament.
I could only understand some of what the voices were trying to say.
They wanted to be free.
They wanted to die.
They could not decide which.
Then the mass pushed up against something we had not noticed before—a transparent wall or field, very like the bubble in which I had been swept away from the San’Shyuum system. A cage within a cage. Forerunners had wrapped this thing, this mass, this Gravemind and then had left it here—or had died defending it and this place, died before they could reclaim their fellows and cure them of this atrocity.
If they have a cure, which I doubt very much.
I could not stand any more. I grabbed Gamelpar, lifted him up, and carried him back down the corridor, as the last light in the hall, from outside, faded, and the only glow that remained came from the excited mass within, still crying out in false hope, pain, despair.
FIFTEEN
IN OUR PANIC, we could not quickly find our way back to the small boat, moored somewhere below us. And in our flight, all three of us, blundering through the twilight cast by the sky bridge, kept coming across more corpses—more decay.
More dead Forerunners, lying on decks, bridges, walkways, or within dwellings.
Hundreds of them. And no humans.
Yet there were no signs of explosions or fire, only of sharp blades—perhaps fishing tools, likely human-made—or improvised clubs, and of course none wore protective armor.
Something had compelled them to square off against each other in this most unlikely of places, and they had fought until all had died—down to the very last Forerunner, I guessed, and the Lord of Admirals supported me on that much.
But why?
They fought for a prize—or to prevent that prize from falling into the wrong hands.
“What prize?” I cried out as I ran, Vinnevra close behind, Gamelpar not within sight.
Realizing that, we both stopped, until I saw him, half-dead with exhaustion and pain, stumping and crutching along a far bridge.
“You … two … children!” he shouted. “It’s back that way. You missed it.” We backtracked to join him. He led us back to the ladder, the hatch—all in deeper darkness, until we could only feel with our feet the last flight of steep stairs down to the docks, and hear the lapping of the waves against the dock and the pillars all around.
In the deepest shadow of all, we managed to crawl into the boat, cast off the line, pick up our oars, and push out from beneath the suspended village.
While above, not nearly far enough above, the mass thumped and writhed again and again and the whole village shook, dropping grit and dirt and who could guess what else down on our heads and necks and shoulders.
Out under the stars and the sky bridge, we picked at each other, tossing away the fallen bits, then took turns diving into the water, quickly sluicing, climbing back into the boat—all the while watching for whatever might swim in these waters, fearing, right now, not sea creatures—but other things entirely.
I held Gamelpar while he swung his arms and legs in the water, then pulled him back into the boat, wide-eyed and shivering with the cold.
“What did you see?” Vinnevra kept asking. “What was it?” Neither Gamelpar nor I had the heart to tell her.
We were many kilometers out in the lake, away from the village, away from the shore, in the gently rolling currents taking us now toward the west, inland, away from the horror, when we saw we no longer needed to row.
We collapsed in the bottom of the boat and slept.
SIXTEEN
THE CURRENT MOVED us slowly, slowly, across the salt sea, while night came and day followed, and always the sweep of the great wheel overhead and the stars.
“My old spirit seems to know where we are,” Gamelpar said from one end of the boat, where he lay facing up at the panoply. “He’s been studying the stars for years now.”
“Where are we, then?”
“A hiding place. A refuge.” He pointed at three bright stars, arranged in a looping formation with four dimmer ones and a scatter of those barely visible. The dim stars were greenish, the bright stars, red and intensely blue. “That is the Greater Tiger. See”—he drew with his finger in the air—“there’s the tail, dimmer than the eyes and teeth. Human forces retreated here after Charum Hakkor. This was our last front—forty prime cruisers, ten first-rate tuned platforms—”
Vinnevra reached out to shush him with her finger, then looked at me resentfully. Gamelpar chuckled and shook his head.
“They’re not real,” she told both of us.
“Neither is your sense of direction,” I said.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t even feel it now. The farther we drift…”
“Why bring the wheel to this place?” I asked Gamelpar.
“Because all the worlds here are slagged ruins, polluted for millions of years by weapons our forces—human forces—unleashed when they saw defeat was inevitable. No Forerunner has a need to visit here—and all subject species are warned to stay away.”
I had not heard of subject species before. “Subject species … who are they?” I asked. “Like us?”
“No. We were the defeated. There were also subservient allies. Some were used to gather and imprison humans after the defeat.” His face worked in disgust.
“A place no one visits … why here?” I asked Gamelpar.
Because it is stolen. Let the two of us old spirits rise and talk directly.
I shook my head stubbornly. Gamelpar watched me closely and gave the slightest nod, as if approving. Neither of us wanted to be out here on the strange salt sea under the control of dead warriors from long, long ago.
“They’re strong,” I whispered, not to disturb Vinnevra, lying down now with eyes closed.
“They are we,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before they are harvested. And we might die when that happens. My old spirit speaks sometimes of something he thinks they called the Composer—Forerunner or machine, I don’t know which. But the Composer was once used for such purposes, in the past.”
I didn’t want to understand what this meant, so I shook my head, lay back beside Vinnevra, and shut my eyes.
* * *
Just as light crossed over the sea, the boat’s rocking woke me from a dream that was entirely my own, a dream of the grasslands outside Marontik, where I hid by the side of a rutted wagon path, stalking well-to-do merchants.…
