David Farland - Beyond the Gate

Ceravanne pulled the glow globe from her pocket, and even its brilliant white light would not let them see more than five yards ahead. The aircar made a deep thrumming, grinding noise as it swung around to the southeast.

Gallen called to the others, telling them to form a group as they climbed. He was merely waiting for the ground to stop shaking, for rocks to quit sliding from the cliff wall above, and Orick hoped that as Maggie moved the aircar, it would become safer for them to begin running again.

And suddenly Orick heard the whine of rockets accelerating toward them, off toward the aircar. The rockets slammed into the car with a pinging noise, and a huge explosion lifted them all from their feet.

Orick looked toward the aircar for any sign of a flash or burning. But in the inky darkness, Orick could see nothing but a brief lightening of the darkness, and then bits of metal and rock and ash began to rain down upon them.

“Maggie!” Orick cried, and Gallen stood watching the empty space, a look of utter desolation on his face. “Maggie!” Orick called again, and he began to run toward the car.

“Stop!” Gallen shouted at Orick’s back, and when Orick turned to look at his face, Gallen turned away. “She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do.”

For one brief moment, it looked as if Gallen would crumple under his own weight. It looked as if some invisible support had been kicked out from beneath him, and he dropped partway to one knee. But then he lifted himself and began scrambling up the rocks. Orick heard Gallen sniff, saw him wipe at his eyes with his sleeve. Then Gallen pulled his dronon pulp gun, and his robes suddenly used their chameleon abilities to turn jet-black, to match the darkness.

Somehow, Orick found that he was unprepared for this. He’d imagined that if anyone would die in this battle, it would have been frail Ceravanne or the Bock or that maybe even Gallen would take on more than he could handle-but not Maggie.

“Gallen?” Orick cried at his back.

“She’s gone,” Gallen shouted, and he leapt forward to a boulder, then another, running up over the broken field of rubble without thought of stones still tumbling and crashing from the face of the cliff. Ceravanne ran behind him, calling for him to slow down, holding the light aloft, but she soon lost him in the dark.

And so she stopped and waited for the Bock and Orick to catch up. With his mantle, Gallen could see in the full darkness better than any man, and within seconds there was no sound of him.

Orick stopped beside Ceravanne, and the Bock made his way slowly over the rocks. Ceravanne nodded up toward where Gallen had run, and she muttered, “He’s in a foul mood. Can you track him for us?”

Orick grumbled, “Not with those damned robes on. They mask his scent. I can’t smell him.”

Ceravanne sighed in disgust. “Then we’ll track him by the corpses he leaves behind.”

They began scrambling up over the fallen rocks from the cliff, and it seemed to take minutes upon minutes to get anywhere. As they passed beneath the cliff, they could still hear boulders and scree falling through the darkness around them, but they did not see the dropping stones. By now, between the thunderheads, the Black Fog, and the deep shadows of the Tekkar’s city, the air around them was darker than any night.

And as they rushed through the rooms, Orick smelled blood ahead. The rooms were like nothing he had imagined: they had a peculiar fluid form to them, and the walls were covered with some white plaster. Orick could almost sense the sleek lines of some living creature, and he realized that the walls reminded him of nothing more than bones, as if they were in some vast hollowed-out bones.

There were torches lying about here and there, bodies crushed under falling rocks, tapestries sitting in heaps on the floor, wide silver washing or drinking vessels. And along the walls were thousands of small clay pots with long stems. Many had fallen over, and lay broken, with bits of ash and bone spilling out.

“What’s this?” Orick called as they ran.

Ceravanne said, “The dead. It is said that the kings of Moree were protected by the spirits of their dead.” And Orick saw that it was still true, more so than ever, for the Inhuman also relied upon those who had died for protection.

The group passed a Tekkar servant woman whose head was horribly crushed, part of her cheek ripped away, and she cried out from a swollen mouth, grasped the fur on Orick’s leg, begging aid. Orick looked into her deep purple eyes as he passed, saw how they were not focused, and knew that she would die whether he helped her or not. They reached some smoothly undulating stairs with golden handholds fastened to the wall, each shaped like the head of a dog. They rushed up several flights, climbing over debris, and Orick saw Gallen’s tracks in the dirt.

A moment later, they reached a landing and found the body of a Tekkar guard, his chest blown apart. And from up ahead there came shouting, followed by the burp of gunfire and the explosion of shells.

“This way,” Ceravanne cried, leaping over the corpse, and she redoubled her speed as she chased the sound of battle.

And Orick suddenly realized that Gallen was doing it all without him, that Gallen had rushed ahead and was avenging Maggie by killing the Harvester and the Inhuman. Always in the past, he had been left behind. He’d let Gallen fight the great battles and get the glory, and never had he minded.

But over the past days, he’d lost three friends. Grits had been left behind, and Tallea was now food for the Derrits, and Maggie had just been blown apart, and Orick decided that he’d rather be damned in hell than let Gallen take all the vengeance this time.

They reached a huge set of double doors, twenty feet tall and ten feet wide, made of thick wooden planks with great brass rings to pull on. The doors were already opened just wide enough for a thin man to squeeze through.

Lying at the foot of the doors were eleven or twelve Tekkar, sprawled in a bloody heap. Orick leapt up and grabbed a brass ring in his teeth, then pulled back the door, swung it wider.

Ceravanne held up the glow globe, and peered inside. There was a great chamber, sixty feet long, with ceilings forty feet high. The dim red lights scavenged from a dronon hive city glowed at the far end, and beneath the lights on a broad-backed throne of gold sat a small woman, her shoulders hunched, a golden mantle cascading over her shoulders.

Gallen himself was kneeling before the throne, his mantle spread before him on the floor, his dronon pulp pistol discarded at his side. Orick’s heart skipped a beat. Gallen had come all this way to protect them, to fight for them, and now Orick saw him kneeling, helpless before the Harvester. The heavy scent of the Harvester’s pheromones filled the room, sweet and cloying.

For her part, the Harvester seemed to be staring into Gallen’s face, and she looked up as Ceravanne and Orick entered, her sad green eyes gazing at them, so much like Ceravanne’s eyes.

All along the walls were doorways, and at each doorway stood a Tekkar guard, draped in black robes that were longer than the norm, holding a sword pointed down toward the floor. Four guards lay sprawled upon the carpet just inside the door, where Gallen had killed them.

The Harvester reached out toward them, made a pulling gesture, as the Inhuman’s agents often did when greeting one another, and said softly, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The room’s lights shone over her platinum hair, sparkled in her pale green eyes. Ceravanne looked at herself, the Harvester.

The Harvester glanced about at Gallen and the others in confusion. “It took only four of you to cause so much destruction?”