Broken Crescent (6 page)

The central carving had fared worse than the people. Not only had it suffered weathering, to Nate it looked as if it had, at one time, been purposely defaced.

Even with large parts of it obscured or broken away, Nate could tell that it had been something constructed with organic curves, almost plantlike. Unlike the people, it had been carved with an eye for depth. Part of it might even have risen above the surface of the stone before it had been defaced. The outline reminded Nate, from various angles, of a complex knot, an insect, a flower, and an octopus. Stone tendrils and leaflike objects fed into a central area where damage had rendered the whole as little more than a broken lump of stone.

The carving retained some of its original impact simply in the contrast between the flattened people, and the three-dimensional focus. It was as if someone had dropped a photo-realistic Renaissance etching in the middle of a tenth century woodcut. A sphere visiting flatland.

It was another thing that didn’t coincide with any place he knew about. He had never seen anything like this in a museum. Though, from the remains of the building this stone had been a part of, the people who’d carved it had probably long since stopped being relevant.

It was late in the afternoon before anyone deigned to take notice of him again. The shadows of the great city had just overtaken the small camp, when the officer and his men stood up, looking down toward the road. Nate followed their gaze and saw four men leave the road to start up the hillside.

Changing of the guard,
Nate thought. He wondered what they were guarding against, and why there wasn’t a permanent structure here for them.
Perhaps a recent conflict, or a rise in the crime rate? Maybe they haven’t had time to build a guardhouse.
Though, as far as defending the city went, there was little anyone could see here on the hillside that wasn’t visible from one of the towers that rose from the plateau.

There was a lot of handshaking between the two groups of guardsmen. They were all dressed similarly, but with slight variations to each outfit that suggested that the clothes were all handmade at different times by different people. The leader of the new group sported the double cord of Nate’s own officer, though his were both silver.

The two leaders met by grasping each other’s forearms, pulling together and quickly breaking away, almost a macho hug. Then Nate’s officer faced the remaining three newcomers and slapped his left shoulder. It seemed to be a salute. The three men repeated the gesture.

Then the new guy looked toward Nate’s tree and started asking questions. The conversation lasted quite a while.

At the end of it, the new officer took a good look at Nate, but didn’t approach. He waved his hand, seeming to take in all the scattered white stones on the hillside, saying something that made everyone nod sagely, as if great wisdom had been spoken.

Nate’s officer came toward him with dagger drawn while his men picked up various pieces of gear. It took a lot of effort for Nate not to cringe as the blade approached, and he still closed his eyes as the officer bent over him. Intellectually, Nate knew that if this guy was out to slit his throat, he could have done it any time within the last four or five hours, but he still—in his gut—expected to feel the steel bite his neck.

What it bit was the rope binding him to the tree.

The officer said something to him and gestured upward with the dagger. Nate got unsteadily to his feet, staggering somewhat without his arms to help him. The officer didn’t move to assist him.

“Couldn’t you at least tie my hands in front—”

The officer had turned around and shouted something back at his men. There was some laughter. The officer had to repeat himself, and the man who had looked in Nate’s wallet stepped forward wearing a sullen expression.

The man approached and slapped his shoulder in a salute. Then the officer handed the man the severed end of the rope that still bound Nate’s hands. Nate’s new escort gave him a look of pure disgust.

Nate looked him in the eye and said, “So what did I do to you?”

The man actually stepped back and put a hand on his sword.

The quartet marched down the path that their relief crew had walked up. Nate took up the rear with his unenthusiastic escort. They came down to the cobbled main road, and started heading in toward the plateau city.

Nate couldn’t help but stare at their destination. It loomed over them, blocking out more and more of the sky as they approached. The details were endless. Even on the patches of rock that at first looked like unworked stone, a second look revealed details that had to have been carved, and weathered by wind and surf. A lump of stone suddenly made itself appear as a column. A crack in the rock became a weathered alcove, a boulder resting in the surf actually was a gigantic stone block fallen from some ancient wall.

Nate looked down at his feet and saw that the cobbles that made up the road they walked upon contained fragments of old carving. The stone under his feet matched the ruins up on the hill.

They walked across the peninsula joining the rock to the mainland. The air was a constant salt mist down here, and the surf crashed so loudly that Nate’s guards couldn’t talk to each other over the sound.

A wooden cart drawn by a pair of ratty-looking mules slowly passed them. Another farmer, who could have been Grandpa’s long lost twin brother, was slowly drawing a load of chickens up toward the city.

Nate looked up at the man.

Grandpa’s twin saw Nate, and his eyes widened. The man quickly looked away and muttered something to himself.

“What the . . .”

A gloved hand backhanded the side of Nate’s face. He turned, spitting blood, to see his new escort staring at him. He shouted something incomprehensible at Nate and looked pissed.

Nate wished his hands were free to probe his jaw to see if anything was loose. The FBI or the Secret Service would definitely have been the better alternative.

The wide road they were on started on an upward slope, edging toward the right side of the massive rock. They were now too close for Nate to see the whole city. Most of it was too high up to see anything from this steep an angle.

They walked on, starting the spiral that circled the rock. On the left wall, where the rock face shot almost straight up, some long-ago sculptor had carved statuary into the rock. They passed every type of scene imaginable, romantic to violent, single people to massive crowds of activity. All had details worn away by ages of surf spray. And all seemed to have the same distorted proportions as the figures Nate had seen in the stone up on the hillside.

Many had been likewise defaced.

It wasn’t until nearly the end of the forty-five-minute hike up the spiral road that Nate realized that the distortions of the sculpture were not simply artistic license.

As they walked up, they passed the occasional wagon heading downward. Many seemed to be farmers returning home, wagons empty, goods sold. But there were a few that seemed to be taking trade in the other direction. Those wagons were towed by teams of fresh looking animals, driven by men with finer dress and thicker guts than the farmers Nate had seen. These vehicles were covered and richly painted.

Near their ultimate destination, Nate saw a wagon that didn’t fit into either of the two categories. The wagon was black, covered by a few silver highlights. The single gray mare drawing it was driven by a cadaverous man wearing a brown-hooded cloak. The only details Nate saw of the driver were long-fingered hands bearing several rings on each finger. As it passed, Nate looked backward, and saw into the rear of the open cart.

“Holy shit,”
Nate whispered. He stood frozen, staring, until his escort backhanded him again. He stumbled on, not seeing much of anything anymore.

He could no longer put this place anywhere on the Earth he knew. The passengers in the back of that wagon were not human.

Even if Nate could ignore the elongated skulls with their fixed expressions, the oversized joints, their purplish skin . . . he couldn’t ignore the fact that their arms and fingers had extraneous joints.

What rode in the back of the black wagon was alien. Were aliens. Aliens with the same body type illustrated in the defaced carvings.

A
FTER CIRCLING the rock twice, the great road fed into the plateau city on the side opposite the shore. The road widened until it reached a huge flat area that jutted out from the side of the rock.

Two large towers flanked the road where it fed into this plateau. A bridge connected the towers, high above the road, and Nate could see signs of some sort of mechanism that was designed to fall across the road blocking any passage.

Nate saw armed guards watching from up near the tops of the towers. Like his escort, the preferred colors seemed to be scarlet and black.

Past the guardian towers, and on to the area beyond, Nate saw at least half a dozen ways into the city itself. The flat area was roughly circular, half of it looking over the open ocean and the last blood-red glimmer of sunset, the other half butting up against the side of the plateau and fifty-foot walls that were now obviously man-made.

There were six more towers on the plateau side, built into the massive walls. Between the towers were doorways and portals leading inside. The largest gate filled the whole space between the two rightmost towers. Looking beyond, it seemed that it was a continuation of the great spiral road, now carving gradually into the plateau rather than hugging its side. Instead of blank sculptured walls to the left, beyond the gate Nate could see structures that could be store-fronts or houses, piled over each other in a crowd for space.

While the plateau area outside the gates could accommodate hundreds, the only people here other than Nate and his escort were those with six carts queued up for the large gate. From the droppings on the stone beneath him, Nate figured this place was a lot more crowded during the day.

He naturally gravitated toward the largest gate, but he was corrected by a sharp tug on the rope binding his hands. He turned and the guy with the rope looked as if he was preparing to hit him again.

Nate tried to look nonthreatening and they headed to the leftmost gate, little more than an iron door set into the wall next to the plateau-side tower they had just passed on the way up. The officer leading them pulled on a chain that hung from a small hole in the wall above the door. Nate heard a distant bell ring.

They waited.

As the stars came out above them, the gates around them began closing. It started with the first gate, between the towers flanking the spiral road. A giant iron portcullis slid down from above, blocking the way they had come. Then, on the opposite side of the circular clearing, wooden gates closed behind the last of the wagons entering the city.

Nate watched as the other gates into the city closed themselves against the night. Nate noticed that with each gate closing, the space out here grew darker.

Soon, they stood in blue-black twilight, the only illumination the flicker of the stars and of tiny windows too high above them.

After what seemed like hours, the door in front of them creaked open. The light from a torch spilled flickering upon them as a man in crimson and black dress stepped out.

After a short conversation with the lead officer, the man stepped aside and let the five of them enter. The door led into a hallway that had been carved out of the rock. The walls were solid stone, polished smooth as concrete. The floor was stone as well, but a depression was worn down its center, stained green in places where water had collected. The air was thick and smelled of damp.

After about a hundred feet, the walls opened up into more traditional masonry, and the air became a little fresher.

Nate couldn’t follow where they went after that, or exactly what was happening. They moved through a warren of corridors, past several checkpoints manned by the scarlet and black guards. The passages were gray and utilitarian, with little to distinguish them except the occasional sign written in the alien script Nate had seen on the aqueduct.

After what seemed like miles of sameness, they led him to a narrow staircase. This was the third one, and—like all of them—it took them downward. At this point, Nate felt that they must have walked halfway back down to sea level.

The stairs led them through a Gothic archway, and into a long chamber whose arched ceiling was supported by squat columns that bore writing in a script even more alien than the writing Nate had already seen.

Light came from iron candelabra that bore up under decades’ worth of wax drippings. Two flanked the entrance, two more flanked a rectangular stone object that could have been a desk, an altar, or a sarcophagus. Behind it, a man stood at a wooden podium on which a large leather-bound book rested in an open position.