“But the Lifeshaper . . .”
Just another Forerunner.
“Without her, I’d be . . . free, but ignorant, empty of al but myself. And you’d be dead.”
The Lord of Admirals retreated, but not before his bitter miasma tainted my thoughts.
I kicked at the litter and performed another thrashing dance of frustration—wel aware how stupid I looked, how desperately foolish and trapped.
How I wished I could talk to Riser and hear what he thought!
I folowed after the girl and the old man.
Chapter Thirteen
THE SMELL REACHED us from some distance away, but Gamelpar gave a grunt and pushed on. The shore was littered with decaying bodies. We made out gray and green shapes slumped over the rocks . . . and then we were upon the first, and my worst fears were banished—but not by much.
These were Forerunners, not humans. By their size and build they had been Warrior-Servants, fuly mature. One of them could be Bornstelar, I thought—larger after receiving the Didact’s imprint.
But they were far too decayed to make out individual features.
Vinnevra hung back, holding her hand over her nose and mouth.
“What happened here?” Gamelpar asked, his voice quavering.
“Another battle ,” I said. “They’re not wearing armor.”
“Every Forerunner wears armor. Why would they take it off?”
Then I remembered and understood. My armor had stopped functioning, of course, but so had the armor of my Forerunner escorts—either jammed up by the metal fleas, or just stopped working. “Something kiled al the armor,” I said.
“What, the Beast?”
“I don’t know. Part of the war, maybe.”
“And here they fought hand to hand?” Gamelpar asked.
The bodies were badly decomposed. Slash marks with puffy, swolen edges crossed what remained of their faces and torsos. A few puckered holes seeped inner decay.
I looked out at the rock pilars and the rope-bridge and platform- town—isolated from the shore, accessible only by water and so more defensible, but against what, I could not know. Forerunners of course could have flown out there, and would not have built such a primitive structure. Likely this was a human town.
On Erde-Tyrene, I had heard of vilages built on lakes, usualy out in the great north, but had never seen one. “There was a battle in the town,” I theorized, “and when they died, they fel into the water and drifted to shore. What does your old spirit think?”
Gamelpar made a face. “Sad, even for Forerunners. Is the whole wheel dying?”
We were too smal, too trivial to know such things.
Vinnevra had walked up the shoreline to get away from the smel.
“There’s a boat over there, behind the rocks,” she said. “I think it’s made from one of those trees. It has thorns on its sides.”
We walked along the matted path. She pointed behind a pair of boulders draped with wrack like thinning hair over gray heads. It was indeed a boat, and not a bad one, either.
How convenient. The gods piss salt water but leave us a boat.
Sometimes I found my old spirit to be a real prig.
Vinnevra stood between us, eyes fixed on mine. “We can use pieces of bark for oars, and row across the water,” she said. That seemed like an incomplete plan at best. “Gamelpar needs the rest, and we’l do the rowing,” she added, eyes stil piercing.
I shrugged. “Water is the only path,” I said, then set to inspecting the boat. It was about four meters long, blunt bow and stern, carved as she had suggested, no doubt, from one of the great trunks. The sides were indeed lined with formidable thorns.
“Protection or ornament?” I wondered, feeling a sharp point with my thumb.
She tried to push the boat out into the water. It was jammed tight. Together, we pried up one end, then slid it out over the rocks, and with a grumbling, thumping scrape, pushed it into the water.
Vinnevra held it while I helped the old man across the rocks and then lifted him up bodily, at which he snorted and made an unpleasant scowl.
I lowered him into the bow.
“Find some pieces of bark ,” Vinnevra ordered, her face damp with sweat. She sounded excited and looked even happier. Perhaps we were passing out of range of the beacon signal.
Finding proper pieces of bark, fortunately, was not difficult. The trees shed in long, tough strips varying from a hand’s width to two or three. With a little vigorous bending and tearing, the strips made decent oars. I picked up several more and piled them into the boat.
Soon we were rowing across the water.
“We go to the town first,” Gamelpar insisted.
“Why?” Vinnevra said, her face clouding. “Let’s just row across and leave that be.”
“Looks quiet,” the old man said. “There might stil be living People out there. Or food.”
“Or stinking bodies,” Vinnevra said.
I rowed, she rowed, and finaly we rowed together so that the boat did not go in circles but toward the pilars, the drooping bridges, and at the center, the suspended vilage. It took us the better part of the day to row against a steady, lapping tide. Then, without reason, the tide reversed and rushed us in minutes toward the pilars, so that we had to back water vigorously to avoid being thrust between two adjacent pilars. We clumsily managed to make our way to a wide wooden dock in the crossing shadows of a network of bridges.
On top of many of the pilars, 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 al. Here, I counted four layers of bridges, houses, platforms—denser and denser toward the center of the vilage, where, finaly, the dwelings 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 folowed, 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’l 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’l 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 puled one up with his stick and soon we had the boat secured, then al 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, stil in the shadows, they were little more than that: places to store things or dwelings for the poor.
I crossed several bridges, looking into the shacks, and found emptiness—neither inhabitants nor food.
“They were al 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 kiled them!
We climbed stil higher, ladder and stairs and more ladders, until we reached a narrow round turret atop a central stone pilar, slender and, I thought, naturaly 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 realy 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 pilars, each about twenty meters apart. Their blunt tips poked through the perimeter of the roofline, forming a truly impressive central hal—or the dweling of some powerful leader.
“Over there?” she asked.
I traced and mapped the bridges with a darting finger. “Maybe,”
I said.
“You might actualy 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 hal. 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 stil, like hunted animals, but nothing so loud folowed.
I looked down and saw Gamelpar frozen in place just like us, facing the direction of that hal.
Then I heard—or imagined I heard—other, softer sounds coming from within the plank wals. 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 realy 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 chalenged both by fear and by the unspoken attitudes of the Lord of Admirals—who had no such sentimental perspective about the Lifeshaper.
We folowed several bridges, moving in a broken spiral to the central hal. Finaly, we gathered on a walkway that ran completely around the hal, 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 smel that came out of that hal was indescribable, not the smel of death—not rot and decay—but a thickened stench of endless fear and life gone desperately wrong. The door’s creaking opening was folowed by more fluid-slopping sounds from deep inside, curiously muffled as if by thick curtains.
Vinnevra and Gamelpar were driven back by the smel—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 wil enter that place. My daughter of daughters wil 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 wil 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 hal.
Chapter 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 stil filtered through gaps and chinks in the roof and wals, revealing a series of open cels, some round, some square, al 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 wal 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.