Fallen (57 page)

When she reached Ramus, she grabbed his arm, and he turned and punched her in the face.

Nomi gasped and staggered back, but did not fall. Her vision blurred. The tears were not only from the pain.

“You never had any sense of greatness,” Ramus said. “I always sought . . .” He shook his head and waved a hand at her. “Time moves on.” He crossed the few steps to the building's wall and pressed himself to the cool stone.

Something thumped through the cavern. It was as if the surface of the lake had been used as a great drum, and its impact echoed from the walls. The Sentinels fell silent for a beat and then hooted louder, most of them advancing, a couple falling from the stepping stones and trying to swim for shore. One of them made it. The other was taken down—a brief, frothy thrashing the only sign of its demise.

Nomi darted forward and grabbed Ramus's knife, drawing it smoothly and stepping back. It felt much heavier than it should, as though it carried the fates of worlds along its blade's keen edge. She held it by her side, the thought of threatening Ramus with it ridiculous. Yet this moment stretched on—Ramus pressed against the building, Sentinels clacking as they came closer across the lake, the air beating, throbbing—and Nomi knew that it had to be broken somehow.

“NOMI,” RAMUS SAID.
He closed his eyes. Next time he spoke, it was barely a whisper. “It's alive.”

He turned his head, keeping contact with the stone. It was not as cool as it should have been.

Nomi had taken his knife and now held it down against her leg. Blood dripped from her wounded temple, and from where he had struck her lip. She favored her left leg. She looked terrified and determined, and she had no idea what they had found.

“It's just beyond this wall,” he said. “Living. Trapped, but alive.” It was there in his mind, larger than ever and striving for some sort of release.

“It's not for the likes of us,” Nomi said.

“ ‘The likes of us’? You put us together, Nomi.”

“Of course.” She was staring at him unwaveringly, as though seeing the building he was pressed against would change her mind. “We're both Voyagers, and both Noreelans.”

“Both murderers?”

Nomi nodded. There was not even any hesitation, and that surprised Ramus.

“This is beyond such pettiness,” he said. He relinquished contact with the wall and started walking toward the building's corner. He trailed his right hand along the stone, feeling the dips and ridges of ancient carvings and inscriptions that he would never know. Whether they had been placed here as celebration or warning, he no longer cared. Time moved on, death racing birth, and sometimes a change was required.

“Ramus!”

He spun around, expecting to see Nomi coming at him with the knife. But she had her back to him now, knife held out toward the Sentinel that had just leapt from the final stepping stone and onto the shore.

For a beat, he almost went back. Two of them against the Sentinel would perhaps stand a chance. And he even took a step, reaching into the sheath on the back of his belt where he kept a spare knife. But the thing in his head sent a shadow across his mind, erasing the idea of rescue, stripping aside his last few moments' thoughts, turning him once again onto his previous course of action. He felt no regrets or confusion, because he had made up his own mind. He acted of his own free will. That thing in his mind, holding back the pain of the sickness Nomi had given him . . . it was merely helping.

Ramus turned the corner of the building and walked carefully along the base of the wall. He searched for the handholds he needed, and two-thirds of the way along he saw them, spaced unevenly up the wall in the body of an intricate carving. The image showed a creature he did not know, and he used its feet, knees, hips, wings, shoulders and horns to climb to the top.

He heard Nomi's scream, and shook his head to clear the sound.

THE SENTINEL DID
not pause to consider its actions; it simply stepped onto the island and came at her.

Nomi brandished the knife and stumbled back, struggling to keep her footing on the uneven ground. She could not help remembering Noon and the others fighting these things, and how the Serians had been quickly beaten.
So is this it?
she thought.
Killed by something inhuman, in the belly of the Great Divide?

Any hope that Ramus would come to her aid had vanished. He had asked her to come with him, but only to share in his discovery. Not because he cared. He had said they were past pettiness, and to Ramus, perhaps everything that had been between them—the bad
and
the good—was all part of that.

The Sentinel clicked as it came, its almost-human face twisted with hatred . . . and fear.

Nomi fell aside and the creature's clawed hand cut through the air above her. She rolled until she felt the solidity of the building against her back, then stood, one hand holding the knife out, the other pressing against the wall.

The Sentinel turned and faced her, eyes growing wider.

Nomi felt something beneath her hand. The rock was warm, like the flesh of a living thing, and it
throbbed.
But she did not step away.

Another Sentinel gained the shore and approached from her left.

There was something watching her. Not with eyes, not with thoughts, but with a presence that lessened her humanity. She was a speck of dirt beneath an ant's foot, a fly crawling on a sheebok's hide. She gasped with the weight of insignificance and fell to her knees, and the lake erupted.

Nomi screamed.

Two things surged from the lake and struck the Sentinels, driving the creatures across the rocky shore and striking the building to either side of Nomi. The Voyager scrabbled away on hands and knees, slipping on slick rock and falling onto her back. She could already hear the sounds of the Sentinels being torn apart, and her new aspect meant that she could not help but see their demise.

The things looked like the crabs that fishermen in Long Marrakash hauled from the river mouth, except a hundred times larger. Bodies as long and wide as a human's, legs thick as her thighs, pincers wide enough to envelop her head, they thrashed and slashed at the Sentinels, spreading blood and shreds of flesh across the wall. It only took a few beats and then the crab creatures backed away, claws still snapping at the air. Their several eyes rose on stalks and surveyed what they had done. Then they backed away to the water, passing on either side of Nomi, one of them actually brushing her hand with a stubbled leg. They submerged as quickly as they had appeared, leaving barely a ripple.

One of the Sentinels shifted, and Nomi gasped, but it was only its bloodied torso slipping down the wall.

Carvings and symbols glittered with spilled blood. Nomi closed her eyes but she could smell the carnage, and when she managed to gasp in a fresh breath, she could taste blood and death on the air.

“Protecting you,” Ramus said from somewhere above her. His voice was casual and surprised, as though he had fully expected to find her dead.

“Piss on you,” Nomi said. Her throat hurt as she gasped in another breath, her chest heavy and tight. “I don't want it to protect me.”

Ramus blinked, then looked up and behind her. “More Sentinels coming,” he said. “They won't be put off. Wait down there, see if it'll help you again.”

“Or?” Nomi said.

“Around the corner. You can climb. Footholds and handholds in the carvings, and we've had enough practice at that.”

“You left me to die,” she said, but the words held little power.

Ramus turned his back on her but remained standing on the edge of the roof, staring down at something at his feet.

“What's up there, Ramus?”

He did not answer. He was perfectly motionless, as if waiting for something to happen.

Nomi heard more Sentinels closing in on the island, undeterred by the fate of their cousins. Without even looking to see how close they were, she stood and hurried around the corner of the building.

The stone was warm,
she thought.
Like something alive.

She started to climb, pushing against the grating agony in her leg, suddenly convinced that Ramus would no longer be there when she reached the roof.

THE ONLY WAY
in,
he thought.
It has to be. But I can't open it yet.

The Sleeping God had saved Nomi from the Sentinels, and there had to be a reason for that. The shadow in his mind bade him wait.

There was movement to his left. Nomi made the roof and stood, swaying slightly, wiping blood from her mouth. She still carried his knife but seemed to have forgotten about it. She glanced across the rooftop, the smooth stone with the circular mark at its center, the places where the thick tubes joined like fluid limbs sprouting from a solid body. When she had taken it all in, she looked at him at last.

“It's so close,” he said. “You and I, we can see it.”

“I don't want to see it,” Nomi said, but her voice betrayed her. Either she had given up hope of avoiding what must happen, or she was submitting to her true desires. The result would be the same.

Ramus wasted no time. He stepped to the center of the roof and knelt beside the circular shape. He plunged his fingers into the groove and pulled them around, dislodging a thick drift of loose dust as he went. “Help me,” he said.

“No.” Nomi knelt at the edge of the roof and watched.

Ramus dug out the whole circle, then drew his spare knife and began working at the crack with that.

“It can't be this simple,” Nomi said.

“Of course it can. It
wants
us in.”

“But whatever put it in there didn't. Can't you see that?”

Ramus shook his head.
It doesn't matter now,
he thought.
I'm so close. Nothing matters now but this.

The stone beneath his knees was suddenly almost too hot to touch, and he rose into a crouch. A tendril of steam escaped the circular crack he'd cleared, hanging in the air like a condensed breath.

Ramus gasped again as his head pulsed with white-hot pain, and the presence there expanded quickly to smother it, casting it down and showing him the way.

“Ramus?” Nomi said, but her voice seemed very far away.

He put his knife into the groove and levered, and the circular stone slab rose easily. “That side,” he said. “Do the same. Push, lever.”

“No.”

“Nomi.” He saw her indecision, but also the knowledge that she could not turn back now. “Please.”

She knelt opposite him, gasping at the pain from her damaged leg. When she probed with her own knife, the stone slab seemed to rise almost of its own accord, and Ramus pushed at its revealed edge, sliding it onto the surface of the smooth roof.

Behind and below, the Sentinels hooted and clacked as more of them reached the shore of the island. No more crab things came, but they would if they were needed. Events were flowing now, histories being forged, and whatever his intrusion had awoken in the Sleeping God must surely be growing with every beat.

As if in response, another heavy throb sang through the cave, shaking the building beneath them and echoing from the oily surface of the water.

“What
is
that?” Nomi asked, but Ramus was sure she knew already.

Heartbeat,
he thought.

Steam rose from the hole. A smell as well, like time gone off or life long forgotten.

Ramus sat back, wanting to see into the hole more than anything he'd ever wanted in his life. Yet he was also more terrified than he had ever been. The thing in his mind opened up into a grin, and a flash of agony coursed through his cancer as if to remind him of mortality.

“You should go first,” Nomi said.

Ramus locked eyes with her and leaned forward, falling toward his future.

Chapter 22

RAMUS HAD SPENT
a long time trying to imagine a Sleeping God, but he knew now that they were unimaginable.

He fell, struck a warm, leathery membrane and slid down its side. He hit one of the fleshy pipes that came through the ceiling and penetrated the huge sac at the building's center, turning upside down and striking the soft floor with his shoulder. Pushing with his feet, pulling with his hands, he was soon pressed back into a corner of the room, staring at what sat before him.

It did not move, yet he knew that it was more than alive. The age of this thing hung in the air, a miasma of smells and sensations that he could not escape even if he closed his eyes. Its surface was hard and tensed, testament to the pressures within.

“I'm here,” Ramus whispered. His whole life had led to this.

There was more steam in here, but not as much as he had expected, and the open roof allowed some of it to vent to the outside. The walls and floor were warm, and not made of stone. The strange pipes strung across the cavern outside ended here, piercing the leathery surface and pinned there with the stitching of shiny metallic clips. What metal they were made from, he did not know. Who had fixed them there, what had handled those clips and why, all were mysteries to him. But Ramus knew that his time of mystery was drawing to a close. Everything was about to change.