Fallen (54 page)

Lulah strung an arrow and aimed at the nearest creature, four steps down. It jigged quickly to the left, jumped to the right, and Lulah's aim shifted to follow the movements. When the creature's head lowered and it exposed its teeth in a hiss, she fired. The arrow pierced its cheek and neck and it slumped to the step, slipping slowly off to the level below.

Others passed it by without a glance.

Lulah strung another arrow. “Haven't you gone yet?” she asked.

Ramus levered himself up, swung a leg and climbed. He moved quickly and methodically, breaking the movements down into parts and naming each. The lean, the lift, the swing, the roll, the stand, the step, the lean . . . He made six steps this way before glancing back again. He was pleased that Lulah had also climbed two more steps, but now she was down to her last arrow. Another creature lay dead below them, but the others came on, and some were now slipping around the building to the left and right, climbing over carvings and protuberances and disappearing from view. They would be scaling the sides he could not see.

I have those words,
he thought. The presence in his mind seemed to swell as he thought of the curse.
I have them, at least.
But there was Lulah. She would know what he was thinking, and yet she fought hard to give him time to reach the top. He felt sad for her—so near and yet so far from her God—but if she turned to run as well, they would both be dead. She was being a true warrior to the last.

And what does that make me?
he thought. There was a trail of bodies behind him that clouded his true name.

The next step was broken, left and right, with an elaborate stone carving, reaching out past the edge and hanging over the steps below. There were various creatures mixed in there—faces and wings, legs and claws—and he could not identify any of them. They were all fierce.

Lulah grunted behind him. Ramus saw that she had dropped her bow and was now weighing a throwing knife in her good hand. She had already thrown one, and a creature three steps below her was clasping its chest, leaning left and right as though deciding which way to fall. She threw again, grunting with the effort, and the knife glanced off an enemy's shoulder and spun away.

Ramus went on, step after step, sweat soaking his clothing, blood running down his arms from where his fingers and forearms were scratched and scraped, passing more carvings and the cool weight of precious metals inlaid into the structure, and even through the panic his explorer's mind sprinted, trying to take in what he was seeing and find explanations for it all. There were words and symbols here, some familiar, others nothing like those on the parchments. There were images of things he did not know, and illustrations of things he was not sure he wanted to understand.

Surely this is a gateway,
he thought.
This must be a way to somewhere!
The fear came that they had somehow missed an entrance, either on the ground or one of the stepped levels they had passed below, but he could not worry about that now. With the creatures closing in and Lulah's weapons rapidly dwindling, defeatism would be the end of him.

And I always have those words. . . .

He whispered them to the air, testing them, and a spider on the vertical face of a step fell and cracked apart.

For the first time he risked looking up. They were maybe halfway, and the steps above actually seemed to be lower than those below. He climbed, rolled, climbed again, and he was right, they were lower, now rising only to his chest. He snorted a laugh and hoped that Lulah heard.

From above, a creature hissed into his face.

Something whined past his head, slashing the air and flicking his hair. He blinked in shock, and when he looked again the thing's head tilted to the side on a fountain of blood.

“Go on!” Lulah said. She was beside him now, weighing another throwing disc. “They're coming. Go
on!
”

Ramus climbed, stepped over the dead creature and climbed again. His vision blurred from the exertion. When he found his way blocked by one of the great stone carvings, he scurried to the left until he could climb again, then had to move along the next step also.

He heard the hiss of another throwing disc, and then Lulah cried out in pain.

Ramus climbed two more steps before turning to look down. The Serian came after him, creatures flowing up the bloodied steps behind her, but something was wrong. At first he could not place what it was, then he saw a dark metallic shape lying in a splash of blood ten steps down, and he looked at Lulah. Her face was set into a pained grimace as she tried to climb. Her right arm was missing below the elbow, leaving shreds of flesh, skin and a strikingly white shattered bone. She grunted with exertion, her eye glittering with tears of agony and shock.

“Go on!” she screamed. “I'm coming! I won't wait for you anymore!”

Ramus turned and climbed, rolled, climbed, and when he was a handful of steps from the flattened top of the building, he realized what she had done.

He paused and looked back down. Lulah was ten steps below him now, holding her sword in her ruined left hand, the stump of her right arm raised high. A creature below her lifted itself toward her step and she swept the sword at it, but it had already ducked back down. Another came and she stabbed, catching its arm and eliciting a high-pitched shriek.

A third creature appeared from around the side of the building, climbed over a sculpture of a two-headed thing and ran at her. Ramus was about to shout when Lulah fell, rolled and launched a throwing knife into its face. She picked up her sword and swung again.

There were too many of them. He could see maybe ten of the monsters on the steps below her, and a few lay dead between the Serian and the ground, but there must have been others circling around the structure.

I have those words,
he thought again, and they almost sprang to his lips of their own accord. He shouted the first word and ended it in a scream that shocked a flight of birds from the forest canopy below and to his left.

For a beat the creatures paused in their attack and looked up at him, clicking and hooting in shock or fear, or perhaps both.

Lulah turned and stared up at him also. Her dark skin had turned a sickly gray, blood drenched her clothing and she swayed where she stood, her eyelid drooping. The stud on her eye patch flashed in the sun. “I won't die like that!” she shouted into the silence.

Wait,
Ramus wanted to say, but there was nothing to wait for.

Lulah turned and leapt from the step, sword raised, uttering a scream that surprised the two creatures below her into silence. She fell on them, her sword piercing a chest and slipping from her hand as she and the other creature started tumbling.

Ramus watched until he was sure she was dead. Then he drew in a huge breath, closed his eyes and screamed the words he should not know.

Chapter 21

A DISTANT SOUND
faded away to nothing and Nomi's skin crawled. The breath was squeezed from her, her flesh felt suddenly too expansive for her body and her skin contracted. She fell to her knees on a carpet of pine needles and ants, and as she leaned forward the ants reared up, preparing to fight something a million times their size with blind instinct.

She gasped at last, releasing some of the pressure, extending the sound into a drawn-out groan that seemed to bleed tension from her bones and muscles. Ants crawled on the stickiness of her leg wound and she flicked them off. The tree canopy above her grew silent. She clasped her hands to her stomach and wondered what was there, whether it was safe or dead, and for the first time she cared.

The silence was broken again by the thundering sound of rocks tumbling and rolling down a cliff. A landslide? Nomi could not feel the ground shaking, and the noise ended as suddenly as it had begun.

She stood and stumbled on, soon finding her pace again. To her left the forest was obscured by a low mist, and here and there she saw movement as though shapes were passing through. She paused and hid low several times, but the shapes never manifested into anything solid.
If it were
them,
they'd have come at me by now,
she thought, and the next time she saw movement she ignored it and hurried on.

The tree cover ended suddenly, and there was not only nature before her, but something beyond nature. The breath was knocked from her. Taller than any building she had ever seen, more intricate, terrifying in its mass and height, awe-inspiring in its ambition . . .

But there was something wrong.

At first she thought the building had been damaged, such was the profusion of jumbled stones around its base and littering its stepped sides. She moved closer, though every instinct told her to turn and flee, and the wildlife around her suddenly burst into life. Perhaps the birds and ground creatures had been scared, but no more. Something here had ended.

Nomi saw a head made of stone. It lay on the shiny black ground around the base of the huge building.
This is what I heard,
she thought.
These statues of Sentinels, falling. But what made them fall?

She looked up at the steps of the building, and here and there she could make out other statues. Some of them were broken, but a few still stood tall and proud on the steps where they had been placed.

And then she saw the blood.

And scattered amongst the stone statues she made out several Sentinel bodies, only these were flesh and blood. Some missed body parts, others seemed to have been pierced by arrow or knife.

None of them moved.

“Ramus,” she whispered, because this was the place Sordon had directed her to, the gateway, the entrance, and such violence could only have been the result of Ramus's presence.

She stared at the bottom of the building and scanned upward, and when she reached the top she saw the figure pacing there. It walked around the edge of the structure's flattened summit, passing out of sight and appearing again, taking the same route over and over. Nomi shaded her eyes against the sun, trying to make out whether it had long arms and legs, or whether it was someone . . .

Someone she knew.

“Ramus!” she shouted.

The figure halted at the edge of the summit. Birds fell silent once again, at the sound of her voice. His name echoed from the building as though it were shouting back at her, and she realized how foolish and impulsive she had been.

Ramus had just killed these Sentinels with the power of his voice.

Nomi backed away a few steps, bringing her hands up to cover her ears. But then she stopped because she was fascinated. There he was, her old friend and new nemesis, standing at the gateway to the Fallen God, and this was truly the greatest voyage anyone had ever undertaken. Sordon Perlenni may have been here long before them, but he had stayed, and now madness informed his every movement and thought. Surely she and Ramus could make more of this place?

“He says it's fallen!” she shouted.

Ramus may have responded, or perhaps it was her own words echoing back again. But between one blink and the next he vanished. And the only way for her to go was up.

SHE CLIMBED, AVOIDING
the Sentinel bodies where she could. Most of them were broken into several chunks or completely shattered, but the ones that must have been killed before Ramus used the curse still cooled into the stone. Arrows had killed a couple, knives some more, and farther up the building she found a Sentinel's head that must have tumbled down from above.

She resisted the temptation to stop and stare at the carvings, images, small faces sunk into the stone, lines of strange writing and symbols displayed all across the side of the incredible building. Their time might come, but for now there was something even more incredible to find.

She found Lulah a dozen steps from the top. The Serian's throat had been ripped out and her arm torn off, but two dead Sentinels lay with her, one of them bearing teeth marks in its own gashed throat. Blood still dribbled from the wound. Nomi paused for a moment to look into the dead warrior's pale eye, then she carefully took the last knife from Lulah's belt and continued upward.

Five steps from the top, exhausted and in pain from the leg wound, which had started bleeding again, Nomi heard Sentinels calling and clicking behind and below her. When she reached the summit she looked down, knowing what she would see.

They were already climbing. They seemed unconcerned at their dead comrades, passing by both shattered-stone and bloodied-flesh corpses without a glance. They had eyes only for her. And for the first time in the face of a Sentinel, even from this distance, she saw purpose.

Nomi turned around to see what Ramus had been circling when she first saw him.

There was an opening on top of the building. It disappeared into a circular staircase that led down, the stairs just as deep as those she had recently climbed. It was covered by an elaborate stone canopy propped on pillars, various drainage channels carved into the floor to guide rainwater away from the hole. The entrance was dark and forbidding. Nomi inhaled the must of ages.

She could enter the hole, as Ramus had done, or wait here to be slaughtered. There really was no choice. After her climb, Nomi began her descent.