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We descended the steps. These cels 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 colection of market stals.
And wrapped in deeper gloom at the center of the hal 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 wal of bars, as wel as bluish tint. Keeping close, we folowed a narrow, sinuous corridor toward the cage.
I glanced into several of the cels and saw chairs, smal 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 smel had not been of death.
Tiny glints of phosphorescence seemed to flit around the mass, like fire flies 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 stil 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 ilustrated 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, literaly 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 vilage . . .
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 stil 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, gradualy 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 wal 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 felows 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 hal, from outside, faded, and the only glow that remained came from the excited mass within, stil crying out in false hope, pain, despair.
Chapter Fifteen
IN OUR PANIC, we could not quickly find our way back to the smal boat, moored somewhere below us. And in our flight, al 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 dwelings.
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 compeled them to square off against each other in this most unlikely of places, and they had fought until al 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—al 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 pilars al around.
In the deepest shadow of al, we managed to crawl into the boat, cast off the line, pick up our oars, and push out from beneath the suspended vilage.
While above, not nearly far enough above, the mass thumped and writhed again and again and the whole vilage 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 falen bits, then took turns diving into the water, quickly sluicing, climbing back into the boat—al 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 puled 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 tel her.
We were many kilometers out in the lake, away from the vilage, away from the shore, in the gently roling currents taking us now toward the west, inland, away from the horror, when we saw we no longer needed to row.
We colapsed in the bottom of the boat and slept.
Chapter Sixteen
THE CURRENT MOVED us slowly, slowly, across the salt sea, while night came and day folowed, 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 resentfuly. 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 al the worlds here
are slagged ruins, poluted for milions of years by weapons our forces—human forces— unleashed when they saw defeat was inevitable. No Forerunner has a need to visit here—and al 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 alies.
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 caled 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 wel-to-do merchants. . . .
Obviously, before Riser took me under his tutelage.
I blinked and looked around. The boat continued to rock in a gentle swel. We were now far from either shore, out in the middle of the sea, and yet swift, steady ripples were touching us, orienting the boat paralel with their troughs—something disturbing the water not far away. The ripples began to subside but were then met with new ripples coming from the opposite direction.
Vinnevra woke next—Gamelpar slept like a stone and it took a rather rough shaking to rouse him. We looked both directions, trying to see what might be causing the disturbances. “They’re just waves,” she concluded, but I could tel the difference. The longer, straighter waves were not the same—larger, wider, they were reflections from the uneven shoreline. Their rhythm had luled us to sleep. These new ones had awakened us.
Something gray and gleaming humped the water a dozen meters away, then withdrew, starting another round of slickly perfect undulations. Then the surface was al confused as a downdraft of cool air fel around our boat and created a wide roughening.
“Merse,” I said. “The lake is ful of merse. The Lifeshaper loves them. ”
Vinnevra and Gamelpar didn’t understand what merse were. I started to explain, but then a great, greenish black fin rose up just beside our boat, touching the side, spinning us around gently enough —and sinking again, like the tip of a huge knife.
I grasped the side and darted looks in al directions.
“Crocodile,” I suggested next, but I had never heard of crocodiles with fins. Only fish and river dolphins, and this was much bigger than anything I had ever seen in a river. It did not take long for another hump to rise nearby, also slick and green. The fin seemed to flow under the water to join that smoothness—then, al together, the huge shape slid beneath our boat.
“My best wife spoke of sea creatures big as vilages,” Gamelpar said. “The Lady could have brought them here. She brought us here, didn’t she?”
The rounded shape and a pair of long fins roiled the water about a hundred meters off, departing rapidly. . . . And that made me peer down through the clear water, down and down—to see another paleness, like the one that had approached us under the suspended town, the same color but even larger, not so far beneath us and stretching to al sides like an island trying to rise.
The others saw it as wel, and held on to each other. The paleness broke water on both sides of us—but what it was precisely that broke the water, I could not tel. I immediately feared the worst—that something like the mashed-together lump in the Forerunner cage had somehow gotten loose and occupied this sea, filing it everywhere, colecting everything that lived but stil hungrily seeking more creatures to add, until it rose up as high as the edge wal itself.
But as I studied the paleness, I saw it had its own nature, its own original strangeness, and I knew, somehow, it was no product of the Shaping Sickness. To my right, a rounded, lobe-edged appendage, purple and blue in color, emerged from the water in a slow rol, sweeping up and around. At the end of each lobe protruded a finer series of lobes, and at the end of each of those lobes, the same, until the outermost seemed to be covered with fuzz.
On the other side of our boat rose another.
The flesh that made these lobes was like milky glass shot through with bubbles . . . yet not bubbles, for they seemed to contain gently shining roling jewels, like little sacs of treasure.
These manifestations were beautiful beyond my ability to describe them, even now.
For hours, as we drifted, these shapes and a bewildering number of variations swept up and down, perhaps observing us, perhaps
ushering us along, who could tel? But never did they try to reach out and snatch us from the boat, nor did they ever come close to capsizing us.
“What are they?” Vinnevra asked.
“The sea is rich,” Gamelpar said when he had recovered his speech, after our fear had departed, leaving only numb wonder.
Neither of us had any answer—nor did the old spirits within us. The reach of the Forerunners, it seemed, had so far exceeded that of humans that we could cross this wheel and climb up the sky bridge, and back down again, and never see an end to the Lady’s colections, her accumulated wonders. Why had she gone to such lengths?
“They—or it—have been gathered by the Lifeshaper,” I said.
“She keeps some of her favorites here. ”
“More favored than you and me?” Gamelpar asked.
If this was the Master Builder’s wheel, this great weapon that was also a zoo, a refuge for humans—then had the Lifeshaper partnered with him as wel as with the Didact? Did she serve two masters?