Paragaea (42 page)

Beyond the Barrier, the terrain and climate changed markedly. The landscape through which they now moved was a barren waste of ice and snow, the air so cruelly frigid that it stung their lungs to breathe deeply. Leena and Hieronymus swaddled themselves in multiple layers of clothing, shirts, trousers, and jackets, but still felt the bite of the cold wind as it blew over the frigid plain. Balam, who never wore anything but his loincloth and harness, shivered as snowflakes matted his black fur, hugging himself to try to keep warm.

Their day's journey became two, the passage through the frozen wasteland so hampered by the thick snowbanks and the refusal of their own muscles to work at normal speeds. They slogged through the first night and most of the following day without stopping, finally forced to make camp near nightfall. They found a sheltering outcropping of rock, meager protection against the fierce winds, and huddled together around a small fire, trying to conserve their warmth.

After they'd finished a simple meal of hot broth and hard bread,
warmed over the fire, they sat in a sullen silence, trying to keep their teeth from chattering.

“I believe,” Leena said at length, shivering in the cold, her voice quavering, “that I know whence this Per comes.”

Hieronymus merely raised an eyebrow, his hands tucked beneath his arms for warmth, but Balam turned to her and said, through chattering teeth, “What?”

“I believe he is Ikaru, the ‘offspring' about whom Benu told us.”

Hieronymus nodded, licking chapped lips. “That would account for his reportedly long life.”

“That was my thinking, too,” Leena said. “And I think I even saw a hint of opalescence to his eye color.”

“But why,” Hieronymus asked, “would this Ikaru want to start a religion among the metamen, spend decades building its following, and then mass the faithful at the gates of Atla?”

“Perhaps,” Balam said, “Per, whatever his real name, may have darker motives than his followers suspect.”

It was past midday on the second day past the Barrier that they reached the foot of Mount Ignis. Since passing through the shimmering green curtain, they had seen no sign of life, and nothing to indicate that the southern peninsula was anything but a lifeless, frozen tomb.

It was at the base of the mountain that they saw the first indication that there had ever been any civilization here at all, discounting the incomprehensible energy barrier.

“What is it?” Leena said, in her awe forgetting the unforgiving cold.

Running straight up the side of the mountain was a narrow channel, ribbed with steps.

“The fabled Stair of Ignis,” Balam said admiringly.

They drew nearer, and approached the first step of the stair.

“Look,” Hieronymus said, pointing to the edge of the channel.

The stair was some four meters across, the steps themselves no deeper or taller than one would find in any human household. What was remarkable about the stair, though, were the sides of the channel. These railings were cut into the rock of the mountain itself, with delicate curves and intricate bas-relief throughout. Leena took a few short strides nearer the railing to the right, and saw intricately carved representations of men, animals, and machines crowding the channel's sides.

“Well, I don't see any reason to delay,” Leena said, hiking her pack higher on her back and mounting the first step.

Hieronymus paused for a moment, his fingertips brushing against the shapes of the figures carved in the railings, and then reluctantly turned to follow Leena up the stair. Balam hung back for a moment, looking up the steep pitch of the steps to the summit of the mountain, high overhead, before finally placing a foot on the first step.

Hours later, having climbed hundreds of meters, the company stopped to rest. The winds were fierce, battering into the side of the mountain, but strangely the higher they climbed, the warmer the air seemed. Warmth began to bleed back into their extremities, and Leena could not say that it was only the exertion of the climb that was responsible.

The trio passed a water flask from hand to hand, and munched what remained of their dried meat and hard bread. After they had eaten, they paused for a few moments longer, collecting their strength and wits about them.

“I simply cannot move my thoughts past contemplation of these railings,” Hieronymus said. He sat on the far side of the step, his nose just centimeters from the carved relief. “I don't know how closely you
two have been able to look at them during our climb, but they are simply remarkable.” He reached out, and followed the shape of strange machines, carved in relief, with his fingertips. “These railings are not just functional, nor even just decorative, but must have originally been intended to likewise serve an instructive purpose. Every square foot of them is covered in these minute carvings showing the history of the Black Sun Empire. And the closer one looks, the more detail is revealed.”

“Fascinating,” Leena said without feeling, rubbing her aching calves.

“I know,” Hieronymus said without a hint of irony. “It is surely a sign of the age and power of the Black Sun Empire in former days that they would expend so much effort on the back steps.”

“Be that as it may,” Balam said, drawing a knife and sighting down its blade, “I find myself a little more concerned not with what was, but with what
is.
Namely, what is waiting for us at the top of this stair.”

With the knife's point, Balam pointed up the stairs, to the summit of the mountain above, where the red diamond of the citadel city could just be glimpsed.

Hundreds of meters, blending into kilometers, Hieronymus, Leena, and Balam followed the stair as it ran straight up the mountainside.

They reached the top, swords and pistols drawn.

Leena was not sure whether to be surprised or not when, mounting the final steps, they found no one and nothing there to bar their way. Only plants, and mechanized gardeners, and the walls of the citadel city.

The stair ended at a wide, open plaza above which the many-faceted walls of Atla rose. The air in the plaza was surprisingly warm and still, and in the wide open space beneath the cantilevered city walls spread a well-tended garden, close-trimmed grass beneath manicured trees, flowers and bushes arranged with geometric precision,
spelling out strange sigils and formulas in their dazzling hues. Small machines scuttled to and fro, looking like wide-bodied spiders of metal and crystal, tending to the grass, clearing away fallen leaves from beneath the manicured trees, and sweeping away drifts of dirt, keeping the plaza looking fresh-minted and new.

“It looks like one enormous gemstone,” Leena said, looking up with awe at the citadel rising above her.

“Any culture capable of generating that barrier,” Hieronymus said, “must have had science we can scarcely guess at. Perhaps the city
is
an immense gem, a cultured diamond grown into this enormous size and strange configuration.”

The dazzling walls of the multifaceted citadel seemed to glow from within, the same shade of vivid scarlet as the Carneol in Leena's pack.

“Look there,” Balam said, pointing. Set into one of the lower facets was an immense doorway, standing open and unguarded.

Warily, the trio crossed the plaza, while small machines went about their business, paying them no mind. The trio entered the door, passing into the forbidden city of the wizard-kings.

Beyond the doorway, the trio found themselves in the city proper. It was like nothing Leena had ever seen, like nothing she'd ever imagined.

Past a small vestibule that led to the plaza garden, they entered a large space whose crystalline walls rose to vertiginous heights overhead. The floor was like the surface of a diamond, slick and unmarred, decorated with intricate swirls of color and light that seemed to shift beneath their gaze, as though living things moved beneath the surface, though Leena was sure it was a trick of the strange light, a reddish glow that seemed to emanate from the very walls themselves.

Strange shapes rose from the floor at intervals, constructed of the same crystalline material as the walls and floor, though whether these were furniture, or sculpture, or something stranger, Leena could not guess. There were also small pillars of polished metal, rising a meter or so off the floor, surmounted by square tabletop-like structures, on which were arranged crystals of all shapes and colors, in intricate geometric
patterns, which for Leena called to mind the switches and dials of the Vostok module.

The air within the city was clean and sweet-smelling, not nearly so thin as Leena would have expected for such a lofty height. And on occasion, they could hear distant tinkling sounds, like water falling or metal striking gently against metal, but whether this was music or the sound of hidden machinery, none of the trio could say.

It took the trio several minutes to walk across the wide space to the doorways on the far side, and they passed the distance in silence, gripping swords, knives, and pistols warily, watchful for any sign of life. But the only movement that greeted their eyes was that of the scuttling crystal-and-metal machines, in their various sizes and configurations, that crawled over the floor and up the walls and over the ceiling, about their strange work.

“They must be some sort of autonomic maintenance system,” Hieronymus said, pointing to the machines as they scuttled back and forth, polishing the crystalline protuberances, mending minute cracks in the walls and floor, and rearranging the crystals atop the metal pillars.

“But where are their builders?” Leena said guardedly.

“This place has the funereal air of a tomb,” Balam grumbled, tightening his grip on his knives.

“Come along,” Hieronymus said, striding towards the doorway. “Let's see what other strange wonders the citadel city holds, shall we?”

They passed through massive galleries filled with sculptures and art that defied understanding; through huge arcades filled with stuffed and mounted creatures of all imaginable types, even a massive indrik. In another huge chamber they found machines and vehicles, airships at full size dangling from impossibly high ceilings, ground cars, tram-engines
driven by coal, or spring, or oil. But still they had no sign of any living creatures.

After an hour of searching, having found no sign of life, the trio relaxed their vigil, and knives and swords were slid back into their scabbards, pistols returned to holsters.

“This is madness,” Leena snapped, growing increasingly impatient. “We've traversed the length and breadth of the Paragaean continent, sent from one far-flung location to another, to reach the one place in this whole, misbegotten world where the answers we seek are rumored to be known, and we find no one here even to answer our questions!”

“Perhaps the Atlans
are
all gone, as Benu surmised,” Balam said thoughtfully.

“Don't lose hope, friends,” Hieronymus said, continuing on. “By my reckoning, we've still only explored a small fraction of the city's structure. There may yet be Atlans to be found.”

“Suppose, though,” Balam said, “that they don't
want
to be found.” He glanced around them nervously.

Hieronymus smiled, and threw an arm around the jaguar man's shoulders. “If there are Atlans still living, my friend, they are but beings like you or I, not the semidivine demiurges of the Black Sun Genesis's imaginings.”

Balam straightened, and nodded curtly. “Lead on, Hero,” he said, his voice level. “I'll follow.”

Finally, they entered a large, sunlit chamber in which dozens of men and women lounged, eyes open but unmoving, on couches and beds arranged haphazardly around the room. All of the unmoving figures had deep red skin, white hair, and long, thin skulls, with small gems of various opalescent shades set into the flesh of their foreheads. They wore loose robes of silvery white and pale greens and reds, draped over them like burial gowns.

“The Atlans,” Balam said, unable to keep a reverential tone from creeping into his voice.

“Are they dead?” Leena said, reaching out a tentative hand towards a woman on a nearby couch.

Hieronymus crouched beside a man stretched out on a divan, and touched a fingertip to the unmoving figure's neck.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “this one's pulse still beats. Slowly, but beating. They yet live.”

“So do they slumber?” Balam asked, peering into the face of one of the unmoving women, her eyes wide and sightless.

Leena, Hieronymus, and Balam moved from one to another, trying to rouse them, but while they seemed healthy and whole, none even blinked in response.

Balam, frustrated, lifted one man off his bench, shaking him violently. “Wake, damn you!”

“Balam,” Leena called out from the far side of the room. “Put that man down!”

“Very well,” Balam said, shrugging angrily, and dropped the unmoving body unceremoniously to the floor.

As soon as the man hit the ground, more of the many-legged machines scuttled out of a low alcove, lifted the still form back onto the couch, and carefully arranged its clothes.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” came a liquid voice from behind them. “It can't possibly disturb their repose, but I can't help but feel that it is in poor taste.”

A man stood beneath a high archway, smiling but weary. He was of average height, dressed in a loose-fitting robe that seemed to be made of spun moonlight, and like all of the still figures in the room he had white hair that stood in stark contrast to his deep red skin; a long, thin skull; and a small gem set on his forehead.

“Who are you?” Hieronymus demanded, hand flying to his saber's hilt.

The strange figure gave a slight curtsy.

“My nomen is Edurovrahtrelarnivast-(Ψ/b)
²
(Θ
_e
)ж-Descending-Viridian-Prime, but you may address me as Eduro.”