Fallen (53 page)

Nomi snorted as she ran, enjoying the feel of her heart galloping and sweat forming on her forehead and upper lip.

Yet the Sentinels were here for something. She had seen evidence of what they had once been, and there was no denying that some event in their history had driven them back toward their animalistic origins.
What could make them regress like that?
she wondered.
Just one man and the stories he brought?

There was so much to know, explore and discover, but as she ran she sensed that her time here was drawing to a close. Things were about to change.

The Sentinels' trail lost itself in a small forest but she ran straight on, hoping to pick it up again once the trees ended. Soon she could run no longer and she slowed to a brisk walk, pausing to take a drink from one of the many streams flowing between the trees. A low mist hung off to her left, and she saw steam rising from the ground around several huge trees. It seemed to curl around their trunks and caress the bark, and the trees were dark from continuous soaking. Nomi could feel its clamminess from here.

Sordon had mentioned steam from the ground, his tone one of wonder.

Nomi started running again. She reached the edge of the forest and paused for a breath, leaning on her knees and looking ahead at the sprawling plains before her. Here and there were clumps of stark, bare trees, leaves small and sharp as protection against the winds that must thunder across this landscape on occasion. Between two such wooded areas, she saw a wide trail of trampled grass and undergrowth.

Something shouted to her right, its call echoing across the hills. Nomi fell to her stomach in the grass and peered over the swaying stems, fearing that she had been seen. There were a score of Sentinels loping along the ridge of a distant hill. They bellowed as they went, cupping their large hands around their mouths and repeating the panicked cries she had heard from her pit. An answering cry came from the other direction and Nomi looked that way, but she could see nothing.

She had to go. There was no way she could match their speed, even if she was not already exhausted from the long voyage and climb. But Ramus was somewhere ahead of her, and his presence suddenly seemed to be drawing her on. He was all she knew up here now that everyone else was dead.

“Wait for me,” she whispered. Standing, stretching a cramp from her right calf, Nomi hurried after the pale figures even now disappearing into the distance.

IT WAS THE
most intricate, ornate, staggeringly beautiful building Ramus had ever seen, and Lulah knelt before it. The Serian had dropped her sword—he could see the glint of blood on its wide blade from where he stood—and she was slumped in disbelief or supplication. Ramus could not tell which, though he would have believed either.

“Lulah,” he said, and somehow he walked to her.

She pointed at the building, unable to speak. There were temples in Long Marrakash and elsewhere, tombs for the Old Chieftains of Cantrassa, watchtowers on the western shores of the Pavissia Steppes, cliff dwellings carved into the sheer extremes of Pengulfin Heights and statues to the Sleeping Gods dotted across the entirety of northern Noreela, but none of them could compare to this. None had the grace and impact, the architectural force or the sense of something threatening and altogether alien that this building exuded from every squared stone, feature or carved decoration. It took his breath away, and by the time he reached Lulah, he was glad to sink to his knees beside her.

“No human could have built this,” she whispered.

“No,” Ramus said. “No human.” The building was pyramidal, its sides steep and its pinnacle taller than any building he had ever seen. Great steps the height of a man had been formed into its sides, and there must have been a hundred of them. He wondered what they had been meant for. Even the things that pursued them were not tall enough to use them. Precious metals were cast into the walls in many places, designed into arcane symbols that made the etchings on the parchment look childlike in comparison. Some of these symbols actually seemed to stand from the building, projecting themselves beyond the walls and into space, yet the stone sculptures that protruded here and there seemed even more solid. Sentinel faces and the images of things Ramus had never imagined stared out from the two walls of the building they could see.

Around its base was a wide-open area where nothing grew. Its surface had a black sheen, like glass, and though it was dusty, Ramus could still brush away the dirt and see the cool perfection of the ground. It felt warm. He leaned forward and pressed his face to it, shielding his eyes, with the crazy idea that he would be able to see deeper. He could not, and for that he was partially glad.

“All my life . . .” Lulah began, voice catching in her throat.

“All your life?”

“The Sleeping Gods. I've followed and honored them. Not something good for a Serian. Those on Mancoseria . . . we follow more grounded gods. The life moon, the death moon . . . gods that make a difference
today.
”

“You should have told me,” Ramus said. The weight of charms about his neck suddenly felt so foolish. He took them off as she spoke, not caring now whether Lulah saw Konrad's petrified fingers.

“I wanted a god that would make a difference tomorrow. Being betrayed, let down . . . that's only natural, isn't it? So I've pretended all my life to follow the death moon, but every time I spoke in its direction I had my eyes closed, and it was the Sleeping Gods to whom I paid homage. I wanted a god that would wake one day and make everything right again. And the chance of
finding
one . . .
waking
one . . .”

He threw the charms aside and they shattered, skittering dust and sharp-edged stones across the smooth ground. Lulah watched them go, then looked at Ramus.

“This one may not be what you seek,” he muttered, pain thudding in behind his eyes and cooling again. A warning?

“And who are we to say?” Lulah said, suddenly scathing. “Me, a one-eyed warrior. And you . . . ?”

“What of me?”

Lulah looked back to the building, but not before Ramus saw the glitter of tears. “Is it in there now?” she asked.

Ramus stood and walked a few steps across the smooth ground, and the building seemed to leap suddenly closer. “Maybe,” he said. “But perhaps this is just a way in.”

“We need to decide.”

He glanced at Lulah and heard the sounds in the distance.
More of them!
He nodded down at her sword. “You took some?”

“One. And only because it seemed to be wounded, or old. Slow. More than one of those things comes at me, I don't think I'll get away.” She looked at her ruined left hand, then raised her eyebrows as if to ask the same of him.

“Those words work on them,” he said. He looked back at the looming building, eyeing the large steps and the way its top seemed to flatten out. “They sound a long way off. Help me find a door, maybe we can get in before—”

“I won't end up like that,” Lulah said.

“Like what?”

“Turned to stone. I'll die fighting.”

Ramus could not decide whether that was suspicion in her eye or fear. “I'd never hurt you like that.”

She nodded once, unconvinced.

They went together to the base of the building, always keeping one ear on the sounds of those creatures approaching from the north and west. Ramus had suspected there would be no entrance at ground level, and he was right. As he looked up at what seemed this close to be sheer walls, he began to fear that there would be no entrance anywhere. Why should there be? If the Gods had put this here, would they leave an easy route inside?

“We need to climb,” he said.

“I thought we'd had enough of that.” Lulah sheathed her sword and reached up to the lip of the first step. She touched the stone gingerly, paused, then pulled herself up. Squatting a man's height above him, she reached down.

“I'll do it myself,” he said. Something was happening. Something was wrong. His was not the only consciousness in his mind, and his were not the only thoughts. It was similar to the feeling he'd had by those steam vents, but there the invaders into his mind had been memories from elsewhere. Here, they had the immediacy of thought.

“What is it?” Lulah asked.

“Nothing . . .”

“We're trapping ourselves here, you know.” She stood above him and looked down, a warrior viewing things from aspects he had not even considered. He thought about going onward, and she looked back at their flanks. “If those things come close enough, we'll never get down. And if they choose to climb as well . . . we could hold them off, for a while. But they don't seem inclined to give up.”

“There's an entrance up there,” Ramus said.

“You're sure?”

“Something tells me it's there.” He looked past Lulah, up the side of the incredible building, carvings and steps silhouetted against the sky and casting their shadows across his face.
And that something is drawing me in,
he thought.
It has been for a long time. Guiding me. Resting in my mind until the time's close, and then . . .

And then, he did not know.

Lulah looked past Ramus. “Well,” she said, “it's no longer our choice. Come on, you go first.” She held out her hand.

Ramus heard the calls of those things as they emerged from the woods behind them, the clicks and hoots, and then the
slap slap
of their feet on the smooth glassy surface.

This time, he accepted the Serian's help.

The steps were the height of his eyes. He had to place his foreams flat on the next step, heave himself up, swing a leg and roll. After doing it four times he was exhausted, and he guessed there were a hundred more to go until they reached the top. He went on—heaving, lifting, rolling—and the exhaustion in his bones, the pains in his muscles, the throbbing in his head, urged him on. They marked what he had been through to get here and he welcomed them, because they gave him the impetus to climb. He could not believe that he had come so far only to be stopped now.
I'm coming for you,
he thought, and nothing answered. Not in words, at least. But something else climbed with him, settled in a dark corner of his mind that he felt would open up to him soon. It waited there and exuded a dream of freedom. For a beat he lay back on a step and looked up at the sun, and it was as if he were seeing it for the very first time.

Never wake,
he had read in his journal and on the parchment. And at the thought of those words, the thing in his mind touched the cancer and threatened to squeeze.

“Keep going,” Lulah said, rolling gracefully onto the step beside him. “We have a chance.” Ramus glanced to his right and down. There were maybe twenty of those tall, gangly creatures down there, all of them holding back from the building. They clicked and grumbled, heads twitching left and right as if looking for a way around, and sometimes they looked up at Ramus and Lulah. They seemed angry when they saw them—their hands clawed, mouths open in grotesque growls—but something prevented them from advancing.

“Maybe they can't come,” Ramus said.

“We can hope.”

As Ramus stood to climb the next huge step, one of the things screeched. He could not help looking, and he saw a creature stalk forward, reach out and touch the cool gray stone of the building's edge. It jerked its hand back as if stung, then reached out again, slower this time, stepping aside so that the others could see its hand pressed flat against the stone.

“Not good,” Lulah said. She unshouldered her bow, held it in her ruined left hand, drew one of her few remaining arrows and fired at the creature. The arrow pierced the side of its head, tip exiting at jaw level and sticking into its shoulder. It made no sound as it fell down dead, but every other creature on that glassy black surface roared.

Lulah looked sidelong at Ramus. “Even worse,” she said.

As if the death of their companion spurred them on, the creatures suddenly lost their fear.

_____

RAMUS CLIMBED AS
fast as he could. Fear drove him, and a sense of hopelessness that it could all end like this. Lulah took the lead to begin with, climbing lithely, reaching back to help him up, climbing again, helping some more. Every time he glanced at her face she was looking past him, mouth slightly open as she gasped in short heavy breaths.
She wants to see her God,
he thought.
But we should be running from this one, not toward it.
She still carried her bow, and five arrows remained in her quiver. After that, she would be throwing the knives on her belt—three, maybe four of them—and then the sword. He tried not to dwell on the odds because he knew they were so bad.

And that thing still climbed with him. He felt the weight of it in his mind, and it was heavier and darker than the sickness he had assumed for years would be the end of him.

“Come on,” Lulah said. “Keep climbing! Come
on
!” She boosted him up onto the next step.

Ramus rolled, stood and looked back down. The creatures were coming, and the only reason they had not reached them yet was caution. They climbed with ease, their long arms and legs reaching spiderlike over the weather-smoothed edges of the huge steps. They were stalking the two intruders. Ramus was not sure, but some of them seemed to be looking past him toward the top of the building as well.