Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

From up here, the hieroglyphics seemed to fit together. She could see that the images were in series. As she climbed higher from slab to slab, she could see more of them. In this whole area, the crumbled wall which seemed to stretch a thousand yards and more, the hieroglyphics resembled nothing so much as a comic strip, an illustrated story. As Max helped her to the top slab, she lay down on her stomach and read the story stretched out below.

“Do you see what I…?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t quite understand what it means.”

Trianna was climbing below her. She stopped too, and brushed a few strands of blond hair out of her face to examine the pictures below.

“Come on,” Max hissed. “Time to read the comics later.”

Eviane crawled across a pitted stone surface to the other side, where, finally, they could look down on the stronghold of the Cabal.

The sound of chanting and screaming had grown more pervasive, and Robin Bowles’s voice more distinct.

Eviane clutched her hands to her head. Visions of horror crushed in on her, devouring her desperately needed confidence.

When she thought about the plain of hieroglyphics below, she could see the pieces, the shadows and outlines, but she also saw a hideous shape, a form that was only hinted at in the drawings; and this was no drawing. In her mind she saw it: titanic, octopusheaded, making sounds that it would be blasphemy to translate into any human tongue.

“Are you all right?” Trianna asked. Eviane opened her eyes, stared into her companion’s face. Was this woman going to die? She had had visions about some of the others, and one of them had already come true.

They were trying to rescue Robin Bowles, but with every fiber of her being, Eviane knew that it was already too late.

But was Trianna, specifically, already one of the dead? Eviane stared into the face, trying not to listen to the wind, to remember the creature around her, to resolve her riddle named Michelle, and discover Was Trianna going to die? “Why are you looking at me like that?” the girl asked. Eviane lied. “I just realized that this is almost over, and we never really sat down and talked. I don’t know you at all.” Trianna smiled. “We’ll have time after it’s all over.”

“I hope so,” Eviane said. “I really hope so.”

The Adventurers looked down over the rocky decline that separated them from the stronghold of the Cabal. A wisp of pale smoke drifted up from a round ventilation hole, marking the spot.

“I think I see a path,” Francis Hebert said. “See there?”

Max shielded his eyes. “Dammit, I can’t tell whether that’s concave or convex. This place is crazier than chopsticks for a snake.”

“I’ll go first,” Francis said.

Hebert slipped the first couple of feet, adjusted himself, and found purchase. Eviane noted the bone-breaking distance that he would fall if the next slip were as bad as the first. She held her breath.

Ollie and Orson followed him down the side of the cliff at intervals. Ollie had jury-rigged a bandoleer from his belt, and strung a string of flare grenades from shoulder to hip. They clanked when he moved.

Hebert winced at one of the clanks. He glared back at Ollie and, just for a moment, forgot to watch where he was stepping.

Eviane saw what was going to happen a good three seconds before she managed to scream.

One of the shadows fluxed. It concealed an angle which had seemed convex until Hebert’s foot moved across it. Then it was no angle at all; it was a black gap, and Hebert’s foot was in it, and Hebert was still descending. Then it was too late.

Hebert scrambled for purchase, eyes mad. Ollie tried to get down to him, but it was to no avail.

Hebert didn’t cry out. Even at the moment of death he kept control, knowing that the sound of a scream would betray them all.

And then he was gone.

“Mistake,” Max said nervously. “He made a mistake.”

Orson looked back over his shoulder. “Test the ground. Test the ground at every step.”

“Too late for Hebert,” Eviane muttered.

Ollie tested the ground where Hebert had fallen through. There was no ground there, just the illusion of solidity, and a shadow that seemed too dark to be entirely natural.

Cautiously, Ollie moved around it.

Three!

They had lost three in as many hours. It made them nervous. They slid down the side of the defile, testing those odd, hallucinogenic angles one after another, staying in the shadows, ever closer to the place of Robin Bowles’s torture and imprisonment.

They reached the smoke hole without incident. And paused, as the music fluxed, and Robin Bowles screamed again.

The stone throbbed beneath Eviane’s feet. She could hear the chanting, and she could feel the moans of agony. What were they doing to Bowles? She remembered those sounds-deja vu-but she had no image of what was going on. Just the deep, terrible dread.

She bumped into Yarnall’s foot, and swallowed an “oops.” He touched a finger to his lips, then scooted sideways so that she could move in next to him.

There was a spot where the stone slabs parted to make room for a rising column of smoke. From time to time the pulse of smoke ceased, and then Yarnall shielded his eyes and looked down into the hole.

He pulled his head away, struggling against a retching cough. “I can’t see a thing,” he whispered as another soul-tearing scream vibrated the stones.

Charlene reached into her backpack, extracting a pair of snow goggles. She whispered, “Here, try these.”

Eviane adjusted the strap, and snugged the glasses down over her eyes. She touched Yarnall’s shoulder to move him out of the way, and peered down.

For a few seconds, she couldn’t see anything. Then the smoke began to shift.

Every few seconds she turned her head away from the hole to pull in a breath of fresh air, and then looked back down. Slowly, slowly, she began to place the objects and events in the ancient temple below.

The room functioned as a qasgiq of sorts, perhaps even the one seen in their earlier vision.

There was a circle of men and women around a central fire, and there was something else.

Stretched out on a lateral framework, writhing in torment, was-the corpse of Robin Bowles.

Oh, he was dead, all right, Eviane knew that much. A low fire cast hellish orange shadows on the walls, illuminated the proceedings to show her more than she wanted to see.

Robin Bowles’s corpse was stretched spread-eagled on the rack, and his internal organs very carefully removed. A cavernous hole gaped in the middle of his body. One of the men sitting in the circle stood, and reached into the corpse. He wrenched free a handful of glistening red, and cast it onto the fire.

Eviane gagged. The wind changed, and she accidentally inhaled a rancid whiff of sickeningly sweet smoke.

The man spoke. “Interloper!” he said. “You who came to break our power. Your soul is ours now, and I command you to tell us everything.”

Robin twisted on the rack as if he was still alive, the bonds cutting into his already red and raw wrists.

“Told you. Told you.”

“No!” the Cabalist thundered.

“Everything. Everything.”

Eviane pulled her head away from the hole, breathed a few gulps of clean air, and then hazarded another peek. She recognized the man this time. It was Ahk-lut, the son of Martin the Arctic Fox. His dark, scarred face was twisted and gaunt.

Now that she thought of it All of them looked sick.

Her tendency was to mark that down to the unspeakable evil of their practices. But now, looking at the twelve members of the Cabal, she saw that one and all seemed spent, sickly, and diseased, as if each had paid some ungodly price for the necromantic gifts and powers they coveted.