The Trials of Trass Kathra (3 page)

It was a tight squeeze but at last she made it through. She dropped to the floor of Brother Incera’s observatory; a wet, smouldering and bedraggled figure looking like something that had dragged itself from the depths of the Strannian Sulphur Swamps.

Three acolytes stopped what they were doing and stared. One of them made a move for a bell suspended in a niche in the wall, but as the young woman was about to raise its accompanying hammer to sound the alarm a voice from the operative end of the cosmoscope said, “No.”

Kali turned, water sloughing from her to form a puddle at her feet. The man who had spoken continued to stare into the eyepiece of the cosmoscope but waved a hand behind him, shooing the acolyte away from the alarm. Though she couldn’t see his face, Kali guessed that the older, more hunched looking form beneath the Faith robes was who she had struggled here to see.

Brother Incera turned a moment later, a look of curiosity on his face. There was also an intrigued twinkle in his eyes and superficial resemblance to the old man that reminded Kali very much of Merrit Moon.

“Leave us,” Incera said to the acolytes. “And say nothing to the guards.”

The acolytes did, though casting vaguely suspicious glances behind them.

“Thank you,” Kali said after they’d gone. “For not raising the alarm.”

Incera shrugged. “It isn’t every day an old man has the chance to gaze upon two new and, may I say, impressive celestial bodies.”

“I’m sorry?”

The astronomer coughed, glancing with some embarrassment at her chest, then up at the cosmoscope itself.

Kali blushed. What she had wasn’t much but she guessed if they were magnified a few hundred times...

“Oh. Right. Look, I’m sorry about that but it was the only way I could get to see you. Brother Incera, my name is Kali Hoo –”

“I know who you are, Miss Hooper. Among the Faith, your exploits have become a matter of some... consternation over time. I know also why you are here.”

“You do?”

“Take a look,” Incera said without preamble. He gestured at the cosmoscope’s eyepiece and Kali moved hesitantly towards it.

“Kerberos and its new companion,” Incera said as she did so. “To the naked eye, so very similar, aren’t they? On closer inspection, not so at all.”

Kali placed her eye against the eyepiece and pulled back slightly, blinking. For a second she was puzzled as to why a device so advanced should produce such blurred results, but then she realised that the lenses would have been set to Brother Incera’s eyesight, which was likely not so acute as her own.

Her hand moved to the side of the cosmoscope and her fingers found and manipulated dials there, adjusting the instrument’s focus until the Hel’ss was outlined clearly and starkly against the background of the cosmos.

She gasped.

Brother Incera had been correct in his observations that while the Hel’ss superficially resembled Kerberos, in close up the difference between the two was marked.

Where the azure surface of Kerberos was scudded with the layer of clouds Kali now knew to be the souls of Twilight’s dead that were drawn there, the surface of the Hel’ss was, in comparison, almost bare, resembling less a gas giant as some impossibly large, translucent brain. The more Kali studied it, the more she began to discern gaseous filaments reaching out from its surface across space and almost stroking the atmosphere of Kerberos, and the more uncomfortably aware of some sentient presence up there she became.

It could just have been her imagination, of course, but it wasn’t, as what happened a moment later proved beyond doubt.

For a second, just a second as Kali watched, the entire surface of the Hel’ss suddenly and unexpectedly reorganised itself into a reasonable semblance of a face. Her face.

Kali pulled back with a gasp.

“Are you all right, Miss Hooper?”

What the hells
was
that? Kali thought. Was it even
possible
? But she had seen it with her own eyes – whether the Hel’ss was trying to scare her off or else imprinting itself with a knowledge of who she was, it had just demonstrated that it was a living thing.

It was telling her it
knew
her.

“Miss Hooper?”

Kali shook her head to clear it of the image. “Yes... yes, I’m all right. Sorry.”

“My brethren have come to believe,” Incera continued, “that the entity is some form of herald of Kerberos itself. That it is the first sign of the beginning of the cycle of their becoming one with their God.”

That would explain a lot, and not for the first time in her dealings with organised religions Kali wondered where they got this shit. “You, I take it, are not of the same mind?”

“I am a man of science, Miss Hooper, not so easily persuaded.”

“You also said
their
God. Hardly the kind of scepticism I’d expect from such a long-standing member of the Faith.”

Again, Incera shrugged. “When we began, the Faith were not quite so fanatical as they are now. There was room within their ranks for people with open minds. Free thinking souls. Our acceptance was tolerated for the tactical advantages our pursuit of knowledge might bring to them. But, one by one over the years, our numbers became depleted, until only I remained.” Incera smiled. “Somehow up here, in my little nest, I managed to evade the fundamentalist brooms that swept away the unworthy.”

Kali realised at last that, in coming to see Brother Incera, she had made the right choice.

“The Hel’ss,” she said. “What do you think it is?”

Incera sighed, moving to the walls of the observatory where a number of large parchments were strung one atop the other. The astronomer flipped them, revealing his sketched impressions of objects the cosmoscope had revealed to him over the years.

“There are many strange things in the heavens, Miss Hooper. I have seen worlds of flame and worlds of ice, worlds verdant and worlds long dead, and worlds that seem nought but smoke or shifting shadow. I have seen the stars by which they are lit and, on occasion, I have seen the children of worlds flit between them in tiny ships. I have seen great coloured clouds seemingly of no substance that take the shapes of everything imaginable by man. I have seen flares and streaks of fire that would incinerate Twilight would we be unlucky enough to feel their touch. But nowhere, Miss Hooper –
nowhere
– have I seen anything like the body that grows nearer to our world every day.”

“You’re saying that it isn’t just some kind of... wandering star?”

“I would stake my reputation on it.”

Kali thought about the filaments. “It seems, somehow, to be connected to Kerberos.”

“Indeed it does. But what form, what purpose, that connection takes, I cannot say.”

Kali decided it was time to let Incera in on everything, and the astronomer listened with growing horror as he learned about the fate of the Old races and its cause, and how the same threat was now returning to Twilight.

“It has to be stopped,” Kali concluded. “But I have no idea how to do that.”

Incera swallowed. “Miss Hooper, I’m sorry – neither do I.”

He hesitated for a second, as if remembering something, but whatever it was remained unspoken as there was a hammering at the door to the observatory.

“One of my acolytes must have reported you to the guards,” he said. “You have to go.”

“In a minute,” Kali said. She was used to the hammering of guards on doors and had become quite adept at calculating exactly how long it would take them to break through. She had time yet. “I want one more look at this thing before I go,” she said, moving back to the eyepiece of the cosmoscope.

Incera glanced nervously between her and the door. “You must hurry.”

“Don’t worry,” Kali muttered, and then, “Oh gods.”

“Miss Hooper, is something wrong?”

“I’ve a feeling the guards are the least of our problems,” Kali said. “It’s the Hel’ss. Something’s happening on the surface.”

“Let me see.”

Incera shoved Kali aside and stared into the eyepiece for a second. Kali knew he was looking at the same sudden and strange disturbance on the surface of the body that she had – a kind of broiling – and then the eyepiece flared with a light so bright it left a burned circle on Kali’s retina. She didn’t want to know what it had done to Incera’s eyes.

“Oh,” the astronomer said, staggering back from the cosmoscope. “Oh, Lord of All.”

Whatever had caused the light, for it to be so intense through that tiny an aperture could only mean it had been blindingly so on the surface of the Hel’ss. And, what was more, the reason for it no longer needed to be viewed through the cosmoscope.

Through the break in the dome, Kali could see the entire night sky above Scholten filling with scintillating drops of light, intermingled with the rain and falling towards them.

“I think we should leave.”

“Is something happening?” the astronomer said, blinking to restore vision. “What is it. Tell me!”

“I don’t know. But trust me, it doesn’t look good.”

“What do you see?” Incera demanded.

But before Kali was able to give him an answer two things happened.

The first was that the guards at the door managed to break through and moved towards them, and the second was the first of the drops falling from the Hel’ss arrived, punching right through the metal of the dome.

Most hit the floor in short, sizzling spurts but one hit the palm of Incera’s right hand.

“What is that – rain?” he said, dumbfounded. “How can it be raining inside the dome?”

Kali looked up, biting her lip at the impossibility of it. If there was any advantage to this unexpected development, it was that the guards had stopped at the sight of the strange downpour.

“It
hurts
,” Incera said.

He groaned as the flesh of his palm seemed almost to liquefy, spiralling slowly about itself as if a corkscrew had been stuck into the flesh and turned. Kali grabbed his hand and stared as the skin and the bone beneath it melded together in a moving circle of white and red scar tissue, forcing out blood, that then slowly progressed through his flesh until it had burrowed a hole right through to the back of his hand. Incera groaned again, more loudly, as the ends of lost sections of cartilage and sinew snapped or contracted, twisting his hand into a grotesque parody of itself, like the misshapen claw of some old crone.

What the hells was this stuff? Kali thought. Some kind of acid? It was certainly acting like acid on the dome and the apparatus beneath it but she had never seen acid act the way this was doing on flesh. The liquefaction, the strange warping of Incera’s hand, the lack of actual burning, it was as if the flesh were somehow being undone and
remade
.

Gods, if the stuff should hit something vital...

Kali wanted to shout
get out
,
get out now!
, not just to Incera but to the guards as well, but knew it was already too late.

The first tentative drops of the glowing rain were but a vanguard of what the Hel’ss had released on them, and the true downpour hit the dome with a vengeance.

Hundreds of drops punched through the dome and impacted with the observatory floor, creating a sea of sizzling holes. They were followed in rapid succession by more, many splashing and burning into the wall of the round chamber, incinerating Incera’s charts, others punching into the cosmoscope itself, shattering the lenses mounted at both ends.

His eyes only now focusing, Incera stared at the ruined device and its cracked, smoking glass half quizzically, half in horror, but then found himself being bundled away from where he stood, thrust to safety by Kali. Her sudden manoeuvre sent the two of them crashing to floor where Kali rolled them over and over, their bodies narrowly avoiding the impacts of more of the potentially deadly projectiles.

The guards possessed much slower reactions and were not so lucky, and the first of them were felled instantly; one clutching at his heart through a widening hole as he collapsed with a gasp to the floor, the other simply toppling forward with a stunned expression in his eyes and a hole the size of a gold tenth in his head that was spiralling into his brain. This sent their brothers in arms into panic, stumbling over their fallen comrades in a dash for the door, but the rain was heavier still now and they had barely made a move before each of them was struck multiple times.

Kali caught fleeting glimpses of the same strange spiralling of flesh as the rain did its work, and within seconds they were writhing in agony on the dome’s floor, their limbs and joints twisting and bending until they were grossly malformed, in some cases reduced to vestigial flaps of skin, until the guards resembled a twitching, spasming collection of involuntary circus freaks. Even the two who had been killed instantly were not spared the horror, their bodies shrinking and morphing before her eyes, spreading patches of flesh now just exposed veins and arteries seeping dark puddles of blood onto the floor.

Kali wanted very much to close her eyes – wished she could do the same with her ears, too, against the agonised screams – but she couldn’t. She had managed to roll Incera under the cosmoscope but he was struggling against her, unable to cope with what he was seeing, trying to get away. That wasn’t her only problem.

Above them the cosmoscope was buckling beneath the rain, its own integrity compromised, and it was only a matter of seconds before it fell onto them, crushing them beneath its riddled mass. Then, suddenly, a chunk of it did drop a foot, and as Kali struggled to hold it off them, Incera fled her grip, making a dash for the door.

Kali had no choice but to leave Incera and the guards to whatever fates might befall them and just do her best to stay alive. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and survival would be purely a matter of luck.

Dodging beneath chunks of metal she hoped were thick enough to absorb the lethal impacts, she darted from one to the other until, in turn, they began to collapse above her. Increasingly desperate screams sounded from all about her but all she caught were fleeting glimpses of bodies between metal – legs stumbling, torsos falling, heads slamming fatally to the floor – as she kept moving and the rain continued to fall.