Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

She hurled herself at the monster’s chest, leaping high, driving forward with her ark-steel sword in search of some vital organ. The blade sunk in hilt deep and she applied her weight to drag it down in the hope of spilling the beast’s guts. But the hide that had offered little resistance to her thrust now battled against her slice. And did so with such stubbornness that even ark-steel only managed to cut a few inches down before becoming stuck and leaving Nona to hang from the hilt with her boots almost a yard from the ground.

Nona set her feet to the monster, dragged her blade free and leapt clear, skidding to a halt in defiance of the slope’s steepness. Ara reached the spot where Nona had been and drove her own sword in as far as it would go.

Something was wrong. Nona was used to leaving her foes standing while her speed defeated them, but this monster gave ‘slow’ a new definition. It hadn’t so much as twitched. It took all Nona’s restraint to stop her attack. She paused, there under the great span of the creature’s neck, its jugular far out of reach above her. Ara, too, must have sensed the wrongness and tugged her sword free without launching a flurry of new attacks.

Ruli was still working to get her throwing stars from inside her jacket. Nona reached out to lay a hand over her friend’s as it emerged bristling with sharp steel. “It’s not moving.”

Ara rapped her sword hilt against the nearest leg and was rewarded with a hollow boom. “It’s a statue.”

“But what of?” Clera stood and straightened a little sheepishly. She looked up at the monster’s bulk.

Ruli frowned. “Jula said there were giant creatures on Abeth eons before our kind. There are books that talk about finding their bones in the earth. Some of the drawings looked a bit like…”

“But this was never alive!” Ara banged it again.

The wind changed direction, howling across the slope. Nona caught Ruli before she lost balance. The blast showed them a great curve of the island. It seemed that the rim they had climbed and were now descending might encircle the whole of it. And below, dotted across the inner slope, positioned on ledges sufficient for their size, stood dozens of monsters. Some similar to their current foe and others far more fearsome, grinning at them through mouthfuls of teeth longer than sword blades. The fogs returned but took long enough to do so that Nona felt confident these beasts were also statues.

“This is a crater,” Ruli said. “A volcano.”

“A what?” Clera moved to Ruli’s side.

“We need Jula here. She knows all this stuff,” Ruli said. “She’s read every book in the library. I only paid attention to the exciting bits. Fire mountains and ancient monsters. I remember that.”

“It explains the warmth.” Ara resumed her descent.

Contrary to Ruli’s confident prediction, the crater did not narrow to some small, central throat from which the fires of all the hells spewed. Instead, it appeared to have been filled to the halfway point with a lake that had frozen, only the level surface that greeted them was neither ice nor water but some kind of rock. Pale grey, different to the black rocks of the crater wall.

A thin layer of soil covered much of the crater floor surface, supporting grass and the occasional small bush that might well have grown in the months since the ice was melted away. In places, shallow pools steamed gently but the water that must surely have deluged the place had mysteriously vanished. As she led the way, Ara pointed to the mouths several narrow shafts, down which the water must have drained.

The mists at the base of the crater were thinner and parted more often, offering views of what looked like a collection of buildings towards the crater’s center; enough, perhaps, to constitute a village.

As the group drew closer to the first of these structures, Nona was struck by a sudden disappointment. “Ruins…”

“What did you expect?” Clera asked.

Nona didn’t have an answer. The mists and the monsters had made an unvoiced promise—or seemed to. She’d had no idea what was waiting for them, but she’d hoped for more than ruins.

Closer still, and Ara threw up a hand in warning, stopping them in their tracks. “There. See it?” She pointed.

A creature moved among the tumbled blocks of a shattered wall. Large but not so big that the monster statue they first encountered couldn’t flatten it with a single foot. Nona and Ara drew on the shadows that lurked beneath the mist, wrapping the stuff of darkness around themselves as they advanced on silent feet, both of them wholly focused now.

The creature was nothing Nona had seen before or even heard of. It looked a bit like a thick-limbed dog or perhaps sheep, its blunt, simple outline promising strength. More importantly, the dull glint of its back, sparkling with droplets of dew, made it appear to be something constructed from metal. But unlike the monsters that had appeared to be flesh and yet were incapable of movement, this one was busy at some task.

“It’s made of iron…” Ara pulsed the message noiselessly along their thread-bond. The first time she’d used it since Nona told her about the kiss.

“What’s it doing?” Nona replied the same way, grateful for the intimacy.

The creature hefted a block of stone nearly its own size, setting it atop another.

“Trying to rebuild?” Ara asked as they narrowed the distance.

It scarcely seemed possible, but the splayed toes of its forefeet were now acting like fingers, making deft adjustments.

“Hello?” Nona shrugged off her cloak of shadows, revealing herself with just ten yards between herself and this new, smaller monster.

The creature swung its blunt head her way, regarding her with the black eye set on that side. It looked like a polished stone rather than an eyeball. It watched her for a heartbeat before returning its attention to the wall, grappling a second block.

“I said ‘hello’,” Nona repeated more loudly.

“What are you doing?” Ara pulled her back. “You don’t know how dangerous that thing is.”

“It doesn’t know how dangerous I am,” Nona retorted. But she let Ara pull her away. The iron dog-sheep ignored their squabble. At the rate it was going it might reconstruct the shell of the building in less than a day.

“We should go around.” Clera surprised them both. She shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on nuns who had trained as Grey Sisters before taking the Red, but then again, she had spent years under the tutelage of assassins before her merchant career.

Ara, ignoring Clera, nonetheless went around, aiming towards the more densely clustered buildings. Nona paused to wave Ruli on to join them.

They passed buildings in various degrees of ruin and saw iron beasts of different sizes and design at work on reconstruction, all of them uninterested in the newcomers. One of them, twice the length of the first, pushed rubble about like snow before a broom. Others, considerably smaller, worked on more delicate tasks using thinner and more nimble digits.

“The damage looks recent,” Ruli said.

Clera nodded. “The thaw couldn’t have been gentle.”

Ara paused to look up at a structure that the iron beasts were hard at work on. It appeared to be nothing more than a wall of crosshatched girders that supported a track to nowhere. A track that rose and fell with sharp turns and twists such that anyone who were to follow it would find themselves faced with one steep climb and rapid plunge after another. “There’s no sense to it…”

A few dozen yards from the track, a roofless hall sported a score of mirrors, bigger than any Nona had ever seen, each as tall as her, but none of them true. Clera snorted at a reflection that showed her comically fat, while Ruli laughed out loud at another that compressed her into less than a toddler’s height. Nona and Ara gazed unsmiling at their own distortions, giant heads bulging on tiny bodies or tiny heads on giant bodies.