Glory Season (78 page)

What followed was a blur of shaking, wild turns, and sudden reverses. Yet, combined with pain and fear and loss came a strange sensation, one she had not experienced since infancy—of being carried and cared for by someone much larger. Despite knowing countless ways men were as frail as women—and sometimes, much frailer—it came as a kind of solace to feel engulfed by such gentleness and power. It coaxed a deep part of her to let go. Amid a headlong plunge through eerie corridors, chased by despair, Maia wept for her sister, for the brave sailors, and herself.

The passage seemed to stretch on and on, at times descending like a ramp, at others climbing. They mounted a steep, narrow stair where some men had to duck their heads and others lagged behind. Sounds of pursuit, which had faded a while back, now grew closer once more. At the top, the diminished band of fugitives found another metal door. Several men laid down their wounded comrades and formed one last rear guard, vowing to hold on while Maia, her bearer, the doctor, and the cabin boy hurried ahead.

What’s the point?
Maia thought miserably. The men seemed to believe in her ability to work miracles, but in truth, what had she accomplished? This “escape route” was intrinsically no good if the foe could follow. Most likely, all she had done was lead the reavers straight to Renna.

Her original thought was that she had found a secret path to the old defense warrens, which the Council in Caria had kept preserved for millennia. Now Maia knew they had traveled much too far, no doubt threading narrow
stone bridges through one after another of the Dragon’s Teeth comprising the Jellicoe cluster. Except for Renna, they might be the first humans to tread these halls since the great banishment, after the Age of Kings.

They heard no more clamor at their rear. The last detachment must still be holding out at their barricade. Upon coming to a flat stretch, Maia insisted that the panting sailor let her down. Gingerly, she put weight on her knee, which throbbed, but deigned to let her walk. The sailor expressed willingness should she need help again. “We’ll see,” Maia said, patting his huge forearm and hobbled ahead.

Soon they came to another set of doors. On pushing through, the group stopped, staring.

A vast chamber stretched ahead, taller than the temple in Lanargh, wide as a warehouse. She marveled that the entire spire-mountain must be hollow. Maia’s eyes couldn’t take it all in at once, only by stages.

To the right, a series of semicircular bays had been gouged out of the rock, ranging from ten to fifty meters across, each containing jumbled mechanisms or piles of stacked crates. But it was the wall to the left that drew them, in awe. It appeared to consist of a single machine, stretching the entire length of the chamber, consisting of a numbing combination of metals and strange substances embedded in stone, plus crystalline forms like the huge, dimly flickering entity she and Brod had glimpsed, back in the Defense Center. At intervals along its length, there were what appeared to be doors, though not shaped for the passage of people. Maia guessed they were meant for the entry or egress of materials, and speculated as much to the doctor.

The old man nodded. “It must be … We all thought it lost. The council had it. Or else it was destroyed.”

“What?” Maia asked, drawn by the man’s reverential tone. “What was lost?”

“The
Former
,” he whispered, as if afraid of disturbing a dream. “Jellicoe Former.”

Maia shook her head. “What’s a former?”

As they walked, the doctor looked at her, struggling for words. “A former … 
makes
things! It can make
anything
!”

“You mean like an autofactory? Where they produce radios and—”

He shrugged. “The Council keeps some lesser ones runnin’, so as to not to forget how. But legends tell of another, the Great Former, run by the folk of Jellicoe.”

Blinking, Maia grasped his implication. “
Men
made this?”

“Not men, as such. The Old Guardians. Men an’ women. All banished after the Kings’ revolt, even though the Guardians had nothin’ to do with macho traitors.

“The Council an’ Temple were scared, see. Scared of such power. Used the Kings as an excuse to send ever’one away from Jellicoe an’ the other places. We always thought Caria kept the tools, for themselves.”

“They did, some of them.” And Maia spoke briefly of the Defense Center, elsewhere in this honeycombed isle, maintained by specialized clans.

“Just as we thought,” the doctor said moodily. “But seems they never found this!”

Till now
, Maia pondered unhappily. It might have been better if they had all died, back in the sanctuary. Over the short term, this windfall would give Baltha and her reavers more power, wealth, and influence than they needed to set up their own dynasties, enough to win high places on the social ladder of Stratos. Once established, though, they would quickly become defenders of the status quo, like any conservative clan. In the long run, it
would not matter that criminals first seized this prize. Council and Temple would control it.

This must be what made the weapons Brod and I saw, that were used against the Enemy. Now Caria will be able to manufacture all it wants, to shoot down Renna’s ship and any other that dares venture close.

Oh, Lysos, what have I done?

“If only we had time,” the doctor went on. “We could make things. Guns to defend it. Radios to call our guild, an’ some honorable clans.”

As they hurried along, he turned to survey the row of storage bays to the right. “Maybe the Guardians left somethin’ behind. You see anything useful?”

Maia sighed. Most of the enclaves contained machines or other items that were completely unrecognizable. Nevertheless, she learned something from what she had just seen and heard.
Lysos and the Founders didn’t turn completely away from science. They felt it needful to hold onto this ability. It was a later, frightened generation that clamped down, scared of what trained, independent minds might do.

It made her angry. The councillors in Caria didn’t know about this place—not yet. But surely the savants at the university had books containing the basic wisdom all this technology was built upon.
How?
she wondered.
How could people with access to so much knowledge turn away from it?

The question underlay so much of her pain at all the death and futile struggle. Like a trail of broken pieces, she had left in her wake first Brod, then Leie and so many others. And ahead … Where was Renna? Was she a judas goat, foiling his brilliant escape?

Now the bays on the right revealed frayed remnants of curtains, drooping from teetering rods. There were beds, chairs, items of clothing. “Legend says, after the banishment, a secret lodge stayed at the Former.” The doctor
sighed. “No one knows what for. In time, those with the secret died out.”

On Stratos, continuity was reserved to clans. Commercial companies, governments, even the sailing guilds, had to recruit members from the offspring of hives, who controlled education, religion. These barracks—this sad tale of perseverance—had been doomed to futility. Perhaps the effort lasted many generations … still too little time to make any difference.

Maia wondered if Renna had slept in one of these alcoves. Had he combated ennui, and slaked his curiosity, by piecing together the melancholy tale of this lost refuge? Had he found anything to eat? Maia feared discovering his corpse, and thereby knowing that all of this—losing everything—had been for nothing.

They had crossed more than three-quarters of the vast chamber when the cabin boy noticed a sound. “Listen!” he urged. They paused, and Maia detected it. A bass thrumming, which came from somewhere up ahead. “Come on,” she said.

The doctor looked longingly at the mammoth machine, the Former. “We might
try
 …”

There came another sound, a faint bang of metal far behind them, accompanied by shrill, excited exclamations. “Come on,” urged the big sailor. They limped forward and made it through a set of doors at the chamber’s far end, just in time to look back and see a crowd of women warriors pile through the distant entrance. The reprieve won by the brave rear guard was over.

The fugitives plunged into a new corridor, this time as dark as a mine. Only a single glow ahead eased their way. As Maia and the others approached, they saw that it was a hole in the right-hand side of the passageway. She sighed at the welcome touch of sunlight and fresh air. For a moment, despite the dread of pursuit, the four of them
paused to look out upon the lagoon, and each, in his or her own way, expressed astonishment.

Down below, where two sailing ships had lain moored to a narrow dock, only one stood partially intact—the smaller Reckless, whose sails were burned away, its masts singed. Of the Manitou, just the burnt prow remained, still tethered to the smoke-stained pier. The sailor and cabin boy moaned at the sight. But there was more.

The sheltered harbor now thronged with other vessels. One, Maia saw clearly, bore at its pointed bow the figurehead of a sea lion. Rowboats set forth even as they watched, carrying stern-visaged men toward the sanctuary entrance. Perhaps, she hoped, one of them was Brod, having somehow managed to escape and call his guild-mates.

“Look!” The cabin boy pointed much higher. Maia craned her head and was able to make out the tops of the sleek, stony monoliths opposite. She gasped at a vision of power and loveliness. A zep’lin, far bigger and more powerful than the mail couriers she had known, hovered above one scarred, flat-topped peak, tethered to a straining cable.

Your presence has been noted
 … She recalled the placard, within the Defense Center. It might have been wise to take the Council at its word.

Meanwhile, the thrumming sound was growing louder, causing vibrations to be felt through the soles of their feet. “We must go,” intoned the big sailor. Despite fascination with the view outside, Maia nodded. “Yeah, let’s hurry.”

They hastened with the light now on their backs, striving to reach the far end before the desperate reavers, with their long rifles, came into sight behind them. Yet it took some will to approach the growling sounds ahead. There were now two tones, one a grumbling, urgent, bone-shaking basso, and another climbing in pitch and penetration with each passing second.

The cabin boy banged through the far set of doors and light spilled around him. More sunlight, this time pouring down from above. They stared across a vast, cylindrical volume, its stone walls lined with machinery. Overhead, the source of the rumbling grew apparent—an iris made of crimson metal was widening with each passing second.

But what had the four fugitives transfixed was an object filling the center of the room—a vertical multi-twined spiral coil of translucent crystalline material, which started high overhead and plunged downward into a central cavity. The coil throbbed with imprisoned lightning. Inside those windings, they glimpsed a slender, pointed shape, burnished gold, which had already begun descending slowly down the tube. In moments, its tip vanished from sight. “Come on!” Maia called to the others, and rushed, limping, ahead.

They reached the coil but were held back by a force they could not see, which palpably resisted all efforts to approach closer. Their hair stood on end. Maia could now see that the pit plunged vertiginously some indeterminable distance, girdled all the way by spiral coil. Within that tight embrace, the slender javelin-shape continued its descent.

“Wait!” she screamed. “Oh, wait for us!”

It was almost impossible to hear her own voice over the rising keen. Someone yanked her arm. She resisted, then blinked in surprise as a strange, tiny object entered view. A tapered cylinder of metal, no larger than her smallest toe, had arrived from her left, pushing forward into the unyielding field, decelerating rapidly. It came to rest, then reversed course, accelerating swiftly the way it came, to be expelled with a report of riven air.

The same thing happened again. This time, Maia’s brief glance recognized a
bullet
, before it, too, was ejected backward toward its source. She stopped fighting the tug on her arm. Accompanied by a roar and swarming vertigo,
the four of them ran tangentially to the coils and the surrounding, impenetrable field. To her left, Maia glimpsed kneeling markswomen, firing at them, while others, armed with trepps and knives, approached cautiously, their flushed faces alive with conflicting emotions—wrath versus frightened astonishment.

“Uh!” the big sailor cried, and foundered, clutching his thigh. Maia and the cabin boy took his arms and helped him stumble toward another set of doors at the far end of the chamber. While more bullets pinged around them, they could feel awesome power building nearby, intensifying toward some titanic climax.

The doors were still thirty meters distant when the big sailor collapsed again. “Gowon!” he cried hoarsely. “Get ’er outta here!” he urged the other males. But already bullets were striking the metal doors. Maia pointed. “Over there!”

They towed the wounded man toward what appeared to be a junk pile. A midden of boxes, crates, broken and discarded machines. Detritus of whatever project had created this incredible, mysterious edifice. As they were about to dive behind the nearest hulking mound of debris, Maia cried out. A searing stroke of pain had brushed the back of her right calf, like a hot poker.

The doctor dragged her the rest of the way. A bullet had grazed her skin, plowing a long red trail. “Never mind that!” she urged the physician. “Take care of him!” The sailor was clearly much worse off.

Ignoring her own bleeding, Maia cast around for anything to use as a weapon. There were bits of metal, but none in any useful shape. For lack of an alternative, she drew from her jacket pocket the small paring knife she had found aboard the Manitou. The cabin boy helped her rise, and they both crouched behind the pile of debris. They heard shouts. Approaching footsteps.

Suddenly, the keening noise halted. The growling had stopped moments before, as the roof-iris finished opening.
The abrupt silence felt pregnant with expectation. Then, as if Maia had known it all along, there came a combination of sound and sight and every other sensation that felt like the clarion of Judgment Day. The world shook, while powers akin to, but violently more potent than she had experienced near the coil, tried to fill all space. That included space she had formerly occupied alone, forcing each of her molecules to fight for right of tenancy. Air needed for breath blew out as a presence passed nearby at terrible speed, streaking toward the sky.