Edda (25 page)

Athena then squeezed past Cindella, but was blocked by the bodies of the soldiers and could not reach the driving seat in front.

“Rats! There’s no room! And we can’t just chuck these bodies out here. I don’t suppose either of you can drive?”

“Not me,” replied Gunnar.

But much to Erik’s surprise, the tank suddenly lurched forward and Jodocus called out, “Take your seats. I’ve got it.”

From where Cindella was wedged, under the turret, Erik had only a very limited view—constantly shaking—of the road ahead of the tank. An arrangement of mirrors brought the light down into a viewing box and if he really was anxious to keep watch, Erik could place Cindella’s head right up against it. Once he had satisfied himself that they were traveling up the road at a steady distance behind the jeep that had brought the tank crew, Erik had Cindella settle back, only looking through the viewing box now and then to monitor the fading light. It would not be long before the wood elemental triggered their interference signal.

When the stolen tank had first begun to make its way out of the factory, it had been filled with cheerful and optimistic chatter. But now as they rumbled on up a road that was filling with enemy tanks, all conversation stopped. The radio was on and they could all hear the increasing bursts of noise coming from it. Hopefully, no response would be required from them before their countermeasures came into effect.

With the sky turning purple, the tension in the tank increased. They had slowed, joining a queue of military vehicles making their way to the portal. At least the timing was about right.

“I’d be happy if our jamming signal went off now,” Erik whispered to Athena. Cindella was looking through the viewfinder and they were right in among the troops guarding the portal. If for some reason they were spotted, there would be no escape.

The pattern of the slow merging of lanes in the run up to the portal was obvious and logical. The vehicles took turns entering the last stretch of road before they disappeared into the next world. Inside the tank, the radio was hissing and sputtering excitedly. Had they been challenged? Were they supposed to be broadcasting a reply? Or was Erik just finding patterns in the sounds that reflected the anxiety of his thoughts? With the restricted view he had of the sky, it was impossible to tell whether the sun had gone below the horizon, but the clouds ahead were a very deep red. Surely sunset must be soon. Was that an irregular motion in the tanks ahead? Were they turning their turrets to face this way? A sudden roar of static broke out, like the sound of a plane flying overhead, except that it was a howling that did not fade. Behind Cindella, her face illuminated by the lights of her control panel, Athena was smiling. When she saw Cindella had turned around, Athena gave a thumbs-up signal. Her plan had worked.

At first the only sign that the enemy army was affected by the drowning out of all their broadcasts in a static was that the vehicles came to a halt, with their tank only about fifty meters from the portal. What now? Could they crawl around, out of turn, without making the units around them hostile? A plane flew past, then another.

“It won’t take them long to find the source.” Athena leaned forward to whisper to Cindella. “Tell Jodocus to make a break for it.”

Leaning over the plastic-like body of the dead soldier unit, Cindella passed the message on. Concentrating on the viewing box in front of him, Jodocus did not turn his head, but he did give a nod before clenching the driving handles firmly. They lurched forward and Cindella lost even her limited view of events outside as she rocked backward. At least they were moving. If it was a stressful moment for him, how much worse was it for those whose lives were in danger? Surely they must feel trapped, encased inside the dark metal walls of the tank, the smells of oil and sweaty bodies all about them. The sounds of yet more planes rushed overhead. Yet they pushed on and it seemed to Erik that as slow as their progress was, they must be very close to the portal.

The proof that they had, in fact, made it through to the other side came in the form of a sudden silence. The roaring hiss from the radio was cut off in an instant. Everyone had their heads pressed up against a viewing box, and Erik set Cindella in a like manner.

“Yes!” he whispered to himself with delight.

Beside him, Athena was drumming on the floor of the tank with her feet. They looked across at one another and Athena held out her knuckles for Cindella to strike with a flick of her hand. They had made it! The tank had emerged into a world bathed in gentle sunlight. Ahead, under a blue sky, running into the distance between fields of swaying corn, was a long road, filled with slow-moving traffic. All of the vehicles on it were heading away from the portal toward the unknown horizon.

Chapter 25

EPIC

“There’s a junction
coming up. Shall we take it? It’s only a cart track or something,” Jodocus called back, loud enough to be heard over the squealing noise of the tank’s tracks.

“Yes,” said several voices and a moment later the tank was off the tarmac road and running down a much inferior loose stone track, sending up clouds of dust as they raced along.

Earlier, shouting back and forth through the congested interior of the tank, they had agreed to get away from the main road and ditch the vehicle before someone found their jamming equipment on the other side of the portal and figured out what had happened. If they simply turned aside and drove through the crops, however, that would look very suspicious, especially given the near-mathematical organization of the military and economic facilities of these worlds. Even leaving the road for a track might draw unwanted attention. But, thought Erik, it was better than being caught while surrounded by enemy tanks and vehicles full of soldiers.

The tank was shaking more noticeably now, and along with the clouds of dust, this made it very difficult to see out. After about thirty minutes of this jolting progress, they came to a halt. Then the tank reversed a little before stopping again.

Athena pressed up behind Cindella, so she could shout forward to Jodocus. “What’s happening?”

“Killed the engine,” he called back.

The silence that followed was a relief. No one spoke, but for the first time in hours they could have done so without having to raise their voices.

“Where are we?” Athena wondered aloud, and without waiting for a reply, she unscrewed the lock on the central hatch and pushed it open. As soon as her slender frame had cleared the opening, Cindella scrambled out after her. The tank was parked in a wooden barn whose interior was illuminated by blocks of bright sunlight stretching from the gaps between the slats of the walls.

Ghost was already through the back hatch and adjusting her satchel, readying herself for a march. “Right, let’s crack on.”

“Where to?” asked Gunnar.

“Let’s do the same as we did in that other world: follow the road, but from some way off. Hopefully, we’ll get to their headquarters by seeing where all those tanks and armored cars are going.”

“Or we’ll arrive at another portal,” muttered Athena glumly. “What if there’s, like, a hundred more of them to go?”

Having vaulted down from the tank, Jodocus was standing at the entrance to the barn. The elementalist turned toward Athena, sunlight picking out the rippling motion of the tattoos on his body. “My guess is that there are a lot fewer worlds than that. After Saga, the humans probably created a new world for each group of colonists to use as they journeyed through space. What do you know about the number of colonies?” He looked at Ghost. “Weren’t there five of them?”

“Yes.”

One of the great revelations that Erik and the people of New Earth more generally had experienced upon meeting with the people Saga was that they had recovered something of the lost history of the human species. And along with the despair of learning of the annihilation of Earth’s population by the RAL of Saga had come hope and curiosity at the news that several other colonizing expeditions had previously left the planet. How they lived, what manner of government and society they had, what level of technology—all this remained a complete mystery, a mystery that Erik hoped would be solved by encountering them in the course of this current journey. There was no chance of New Earth launching space rockets and of meeting them physically for a very long time.

“Five expeditions and the original program on Earth makes six,” continued Jodocus. “So Saga is one; Epic—where Cindella is from—is two”—he was counting off on his fingers—“my world, Myth, three; that bombed-out city we stole the tank in, four; and here is five. Then there is just one to go. One more portal and then we are in the final world.”

“Oh.” Athena thought about this, then picked up her bag. “I should have figured that out. We’re getting close then.”

Traveling between fields of ripe wheat under a cloudless sky was rather pleasant, and there was something especially pleasing about the quality of the light, or the air, or the lithe motion of Cindella’s arms as they swung to and fro at the edges of his vision. Not that Erik could really relax and fully enjoy the scene. Instead he was alertly scanning the sky, worried about the dangers of being caught in such a relatively open environment by a scout plane. Then, too, there were the farmworkers who came into view from time to time. These units were almost certainly very limited NPCs, with strict routines from which even the appearance of a strangely dressed group of people would not shift them. But erring on the side of caution, whenever a tractor or group of these farmers came into view, the travelers altered their path and turned aside.

The landscape was extraordinary. It was hilly, so much so that some of the nearby peaks probably deserved to be called mountains. Yet where Erik would have expected the terrain to be rough, with boulders, thickets, and clusters of trees, it was surprisingly tidy. It was as if a god had taken a comb and dragged it down the hillsides, clearing the fields of all debris and allowing for farms to be erected, each placed exactly two miles apart, with the same farm buildings, the same rectangular fields around them, and almost certainly the same farmworkers. Rough tracks of the sort the tank had followed on leaving the tarmac road connected the farms to each other and to grain silos.

A narrow space between the edges of the crops and the fences that divided the fields only allowed room for them to walk in single file, and they trudged on in this way for hours over the long dried ridges of ploughed earth; sometimes stopping to let Ghost levitate to get a view of the distant road, sometimes stopping for longer breaks at the junction of four fields, where there was a little more room to gather. They could, of course, have simply pressed down the stalks of wheat and gotten comfortable while they rested, but they decided against leaving any clues to their progress that might be visible from the air.

As the sky ahead of them began to change in color, becoming a deep blue, the sun declining over Erik’s left shoulder, they found themselves walking up a series of rises. Each was steep enough that it seemed it must be the last, but every time they broached a crest, they discovered that instead of the land ahead descending, it had leveled off, only to rise again in the distance. After an hour of this ascent, Athena was panting loudly as she marched just ahead of Cindella. Behind them, the height they had already reached allowed Erik to view the vast extent of land under cultivation: an ocher chessboard with thousands of squares. Here, at last, they came to the end of the wheat fields, where the hill became so steep that it was impossible to continue walking normally. They weren’t exactly rock climbing, but it did help to use your hands to reach out to the stones ahead for balance as you stepped from one boulder to the next, always pushing onward. Cindella’s stamina bar was gradually declining, but Erik was conscious that he was not feeling the effects of the march in his real body. Not like poor Athena, who was stopping more and more often and constantly pulling her satchel around to different positions to relieve the strain of carrying it.

Finally, they crested the ridge to find they had at last reached the summit.

“Blood and thunder, what’s that?” Gunnar’s exclamation was soon followed by gasps from the others. Then it was Cindella’s turn to scramble up to the wide shelf of rock.

Ahead of them was a large valley, contained within a mountain range on the far horizon and a wine-dark sea to their right. In the center of the valley was a major city built in a circular design, with massive black birds flying slowly above it. A city? Not exactly. After a moment’s search through her magic bag, Cindella found the Eyes of the Eagle and put them on.

Once he was sure of what he was seeing, Erik had Cindella remove the lenses. “It’s an army,” he pronounced. “Those birds are airplanes.”

“Yep.” Ghost was looking through her binoculars. “And see where all those roads are converging? That’s a huge plaza and it has a portal at the center of it.”

Athena, who had sat down with her arms around her knees to recover from the climb, shook her head in disbelief, causing her long black hair to sway from side to side. “An army? That big?”

“Here.” Ghost gave Athena the binoculars before looking at Cindella and blowing her breath out heavily, as if to say, Now that’s a challenge.

“Lug-a-bug! Still, at least we know where the last portal is.”

“Erik.” Gunnar was pointing toward the far mountains. “What do you make of that?”

“What?”

“The moon.”

They could now see all of the sky ahead that had previously been blocked from view by the hill. Just above the jagged crests of the far horizon was a nearly full silver disc.

“Yeah?”

“Look up there.” Gunnar was now pointing directly above them, to where the pale crescent of a larger moon could be seen in the azure sky.

Two moons. A shiver ran through Erik’s body, sufficiently strong to partly bring his senses back to his body on New Earth. Two moons, and in the exact proportions they should be: Sylvania and Aridia. This was why the world had felt familiar.

A rush of memories avalanched through his thoughts; nearly ten years of memories, all the way from when he had first placed a helmet on his head and clipped up to Epic. At the age of seven, his mum, Freya, had met him in the game and helped him navigate his first character through the city of Newhaven. They had gone to the arena so that Erik could learn how to fight. Almost every day thereafter he had spent some time in Epic.

At first it had been interesting enough, but after two or three years of grinding away at getting pennies for his characters, it had become a chore, worse than any on the farm. His attitude toward Epic had changed again, at the end, after he had created Cindella. The game had become a thrilling world once more, full of possibilities that no one alive had been aware of, including the awakening to consciousness of the game itself. And one feature of the landscape of Epic that you never fully became used to was that the world had two moons.

“Erik?” asked Ghost. “What’s the matter?”

“We’re in Epic,” Erik whispered, looking slowly around in amazement. “It’s another Epic.”

“How can that be?” asked Ghost. “I thought you destroyed Epic.”

“You destroyed Epic?” Jodocus sounded impressed.

“I finished the ultimate quest, and that had the effect of ending the game. But this isn’t the same Epic. A second set of colonists must have also chosen to play Epic and started a new version.”

“It makes sense,” mused Athena. “Why bother to put all the work into creating a new world if you can run an old one again. But you know what this means, Ghost?”

“What?”

“There could be two Sagas.”

“Another version where the Dark Queen still rules, perhaps.” Ghost did not sound happy at the thought.

“Is that what’s in store for us beyond the portal?” said Athena. “It kind of fits. If the Dark Queen had found a way to move from world to world, she’d conquer them and build armies like these.”

“Are you sure this is another Epic?” asked Jodocus. “It comes as a surprise to me that the same game was set up twice.”

“That’s where Newhaven should be.” Gunnar pointed to the vast army sprawled out below them. “And all those fields we walked through. They’ve cut down the forest, cleared out the wood elves, and ploughed the land.”

“You’re right, Gunnar,” said Erik. “I should have seen it myself. I knew there was something familiar about this world. Something about the color of it. What a transformation, though. They’ve left nothing.”

“Nothing,” echoed Gunnar.

“Except, I wonder . . .” Cindella pulled her glove off to let the Ring of True Seeing illuminate the world around her. “I should have done this hours ago.”

The immediate landscape around him was suddenly rich with life. The apparently bare stone hilltop concealed a vibrant collection of plants, from dull mosses creeping out from dark crevasses between stones, to hardy wildflowers bowing their pastel-colored heads to the sea breeze. And on the flora crawled flies, beetles, and spiders. Seabirds had built nests in the lees of the rocks, abandoned now until the spring. Tiny land birds hopped along the slopes of the hill, searching for seeds, berries, and insects. Below Cindella, back the way they had come, the view was subtly altered and he could tell from the slight variation in the shadows now lengthening over the grain tops that roads and buildings had once been there.

Further along the ridge was what Cindella had been looking for. A silvery cord, gently oscillating, came out of the distant valley, snaked its way up the hill, and veered away from them toward the sea.

“Follow me.”

Athena and Ghost looked at Cindella with expressions of curiosity.

“They’ve destroyed everything on the material plane; turned it all into farms or that massive barracks. But Epic had an ethereal plane, too. It was kind of like a web of extra dimensions lying on top of the world. And not just the world; there are ethereal paths that even go up to the moons. I can see an ethereal path now, not too far away, and if we follow it we should come to whole clusters of them.”

“Yeah? Then what?” Athena got up, to show that despite the skepticism in her voice, she was willing to follow Cindella.

“Then I’m not sure, but if we can use the ethereal paths, we might be able to get to the portal unseen.”

“Class! All right. Come on then.”

Up and down they walked and climbed, following Cindella’s lead, moving just below the crest of the hill until they came close to the sea. The cliffs here were severe. But marking out a half circle about a hundred meters’ radius from the drop were the ruined remains of an old hill fort, its stone walls mostly piles of rubble. The shining cord went over the wall and after Cindella had leaped up to follow it, she saw that it only traveled another twenty meters or so before stopping, swaying in the air like the end of a silver rope.