Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [65]
I babbled so madly the officer slapped my face and commanded me to control myself. With apparent difficulty I obeyed him—with true difficulty I avoided breaking his neck for the blow—and as the officer moved to snap out orders for defense of his ship, I slipped to the rear of the crowd, entered the vessel, found the black powder room, slaughtered the guards, blew up the ship and slipped away.
Where an army is expected, one man walks through.
Though I’d been told that there were four of the cannon-armed ships, I’d not yet found the last when I exited into a truly enormous cavern lit brightly by thousands of basketball-sized glow globes. Behind me in other caverns I’d left chaos and fire. Ahead it was peaceful and cool, as calm as a lagoon’s surface during the still of midday.
From where I stood, a road of crystal as clear and fine as glass ran down into the bowl of the cavern. That road ended at a black stone pyramid so immense that it reached all the way from the ground to the roof two hundred tahng* overhead. Here, I realized, lay the underground portion of the pyramid that I’d seen in the jungle above. And I was instantly sure that inside those bleak, black walls I would find Vohanna’s lair, and that of my brother Bryce.
[*One tahng equals 1.02 yards.]
The valley of the cavern was as quiet as moonlight, but that quiet was a deception, of course—a trap. I walked willingly into it. There was nothing else to do; I would not stop now.
The broiling, oven heat of the other caverns was mitigated here. My sweat began to dry as my shell boots clicked on the crystal highway. To either side of me grew leathery-barked trees in perfectly spaced plots, black-leafed ones to the right, silver-leafed to the left. They were vaguely similar in species to the brush I’d seen in other places here below, though much, much bigger. Each limb of each tree drooped beneath the weight of luscious scarlet fruit.
About a third of the way along the road to the pyramid I noticed that company had joined me. Between every column of trees, in shadowy light, stood a guard. There were hundreds of them. I saw Nokarra, Kaldi, Vhichang, Llurns, Ss’Korra, Humans, even Klar. Each was a massive example of his race, armed with black axes in perfect tattooed stillness, with shimmering webs of scarlet light in their eyes. Their heads did not move to follow me, but I had no doubt they were attentive to my passing.
Fifty tahng short of the pyramid, both trees and guards ended. And I saw finally how the plants here lived without sunlight. They were fed.
A moat ran around the base of the pyramid. It bubbled and roiled and was as scarlet as enemy eyes or the fruit of black and silver trees. Huge cables, hoses really, ran from the moat up to the trees, and where the thin covering of topsoil had worn away I saw the pulse of fluid being pumped, or sucked, uphill toward the roots that it would nurture. Some mixture of blood and other substances that fluid was—the death of flesh to give life to root and bark and fruit.
Spitting the taste of such foulness from my mouth, I strode the bridge across the moat and stopped to stare up at the pyramid as it loomed in awful splendor above me. The black walls did not gleam but were dull and lusterless, worked with bas-reliefs, raised glyphs, and friezes. Most of the symbols were completely alien to me, twisted and ill-looking in some fashion I could not name. Or did not wish to.
Along the wall overhead were ledges and portholes and closed doors of rust-tarnished metal, with glimmering, slate colored steps connecting them all. But directly in front of me was the only door I cared about, the entrance to this benighted place. It was barely as wide as one man, made of black steel bars, and it yawned wide open. I did not find that openness inviting.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the axe warriors had come out from their places