David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

“But it wasn’t fair!” Athena shouted. “It wasn’t fair to kill me, too! I didn’t do anything!”

Felph looked back to the sweet, strong girl, smiled in apology. “I couldn’t very well kill the others and leave your clones alive. How would that look?”

“You’re always wasting my clones,” Athena said. “You make me camp out in the tangle, where I get killed.”

“No more,” Felph said. “I won’t make you go anymore. Now that your Guide is gone, I can’t take chances with you. You’re too precious.”

“What about today? You’re making me go with him-” she pointed to Gallen.

“You don’t have to leave the ship,” Gallen told her. “I’m a Lord Protector. I can handle myself.”

She studied him with a calculation, as if measuring the thickness of his biceps, the girth of his legs. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

Athena’s skintight pullover, a camouflage suit in shades of black and purple, revealed her every muscular curve.

Though Athena’s face said she was thirteen or fourteen, her figure was that of a mature woman. Shapely, strong, graceful. Gallen said, “It does not matter if you think I’ll live or die. If you’re afraid of going into the tangle, I won’t force you.”

But Felph interrupted. “Of course she’ll come. Athena has lived in the tangle longer than anyone. I’ve been acclimatizing her to it for years. You’ll need her cunning.”

“Six times this year-I got killed in the tangle six times this year,” Athena said. “You call that cunning?”

Felph said, “Who else has ever lived more than a week alone in the tangle? You’ve survived for weeks at a time.”

Athena lowered her head. “Teeawah isn’t just any tangle. You can’t just walk in.

Felph nodded to the viewscreen that covered the front wall of the cabin. “Ah, here it is.”

In the past fifteen minutes they had traveled well over two thousand kilometers. Ahead, something strange showed on the viewscreen: all over the face of Ruin, the skies had been clear. When clouds appeared at all, they were high cirrus clouds, thin bands of white strewn like cobwebs over the blue sky. But ahead of the ship a storm raged, a storm unlike any Gallen had ever seen. Thunderheads loomed thousands of kilometers in the air, billowing in hues of darkest slate. At cloud top, lightning forked and darted like the tendrils of anemones as they feed from their rocks. In their lower region the clouds lost form, became a nebulous haze as torrential rains poured from the storm.

As for the tangle-Gallen could see the dark purples of Ruin’s vegetation, but the trees and vines themselves were hidden in the shadow.

As quickly as Gallen saw the storm, the ship hurtled into it, smashing against clouds as if they were a wall. The ship shuddered in response, slowing, then everything outside the viewscreen darkened.

Felph motioned to the pilot seat. “This is your expedition. Gallen. You should take us down.”

“Ship, stop forward progress, then begin gradual derive.” Gallen commanded the Al, walking up to the controls.

Brilliant flashes of actinic light struck the ship, and some crackled inside. Gallen felt the ship list, buffeted by strong winds.

The ship lowered. The storm pelted the exterior with huge liquid droplets. Icy crystals broke apart on contact with the hull, sliding down the viewscreen windows. For long moments this was all Gallen could see, then the tangle appeared.

Gallen had imagined a leafy canopy, like that of some deciduous forest, but the tangle of Ruin was bizarre. Enormous grasslike plants spiraled above the canopy hundreds of meters, like twisted fronds of ribbon, while other trees sent out feelers, like enormous stamens that clutched the air-grasping, grasping. Gallen knew enough to stay away from them. One towering vine wrapped around itself, looking as if it were made of giant bells, welded side by side.

Lower in the tangle, huge growths had formed on the sides of plants, enormous lips of fungus in shades of orange or brown. Gallen could barely distinguish the shapes, the rain pelted the viewscreen so hard.

On one lip of fungus, a creature squatted. It had enormous black eyes that stared up at him menacingly. The creature had antlerlike growths on its head, a short trunk like an elephant’s, a long dark neck with greenish splotches that might have been some froglike parasite gripping fiercely to it, and on its leaf-shaped body, it had enormous wings like those of a bat, filled with ragged holes, as if the creature had been blasted by lightning many times.

For a moment the creature gazed at Gallen’s ship, as if trying to decide whether it was predator or prey. In that moment, the beast seemed old and powerful.

It backed up on its perch, opened its wings. Enormous claws extended from the apex of each wing. With these, the beast raked the air, warning the ship away. Then it leapt from its perch and dived into the tangle, a wriggling horror, an escapee from the regions of darkness.

Gallen had never seen a creature so odd, had never even faintly imagined such a thing might exist. Gallen looked at icy tangle. Climbing down would be nearly impossible. He asked Felph, “How do we get in?”

“Easy enough,” Lord Felph said. “We drop the ship into the canopy, then pound the brush with phased gravity waves, breaking through the upper foliage. When we’ve gone as far as the ship can go, we have to get out and make our way down. Any ruins will be down on the ground.”

“Upper foliage?” Gallen asked, concerned by the tone of Felph’s voice. He’d imagined this wall of purple vines was the upper layer, and the ground would be a hundred meters beneath it.

“The tangle is at least two thousand meters deep here,” Felph said. “The upper plants you see are mostly parasites, growing on the old-growth dew trees. But it’s the ground we need to reach. Down deeper, the dew trees have grown for thousands of years, so that now their trunks are petrified by constant seepage. Storms rage almost perpetually over this tangle-they’re caused by some rather odd geography, cold winds sweeping down from the arctic, clashing with wet air from the seas under the great tangle. Twenty thousand years ago, this area would have been warmer, dryer. A perfect Qualeewooh nesting site.

“But it’s a mess, now.” Gallen considered. “There has to be a way to get some view of the ground. We need a topographical map, something that shows the features under the tangle. If the Qualeewoohs built here, they would have built above ground.”

“Of course,” Felph said. “I’ve done some echolocation, but the results are confusing. As I’ve said, the lower trunks of the dew trees tend to become petrified, so they show as stone. What on the map looks like a tower is usually just the trunk of a dew tree.”

Gallen asked, “But people have found towers here?”

“One or two,” Felph replied. “But no one has found Teeawah, the city itself.”

“Do your maps show where ruins have been discovered?”

“Indeed,” Felph replied. “But it’s not the ones that have been discovered that we want. No one has reached the ruins of Teeawah. I’ll get the map, and let you tell me where to look.”

Gallen agreed. Felph ordered the ship’s AI to radio the palace, download copies of the maps, then display them on the ship’s holo.

The lights lowered; one viewscreen displayed an image in grays and reds. The map showed an area roughly four hundred kilometers wide and six hundred long, a wriggling, serpentine valley between the hills. Thrusting upward from it, like myriad hairs, were thousands of petrified trunks from dew trees. The five successful treks into the tangle had all been in the same general area, a great central plain here a few steep bluffs jutted from the foothills.