Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (15 page)

Chapter 26: The Guardians

Six miles inland, Phylomon found that the birds were not so thick. The brushy hills were full of small rodents, something like pikas that feasted on tall, lush grass that somehow grew lush and green even in winter.

The morning sun had just crested the hills, and with the creeping light of day, the island came to life.

No snow covered the ground; no chunks of ice even clung to the hills, and so far north, Phylomon recognized this as virtually impossible until he placed his hand in the soil and felt its warmth, the depth of the humus.

He picked up a bit. It radiated warmth.

Bacteria
, he realized, generating heat to warm the soil. Around him, the lush grass grew so fast that it seemed he could actually watch it grow if he stood long enough.

The little pikas had run in herds of thousands, feeding and breeding all through the night.

Now, with the dawn, the gray birds swarmed to feed on rodents. Phylomon hid from them in a small cave, and the gray birds ate their fill, but left after only two hours, and he crept into the open and continued on his hunt.

In the course of a day Phylomon watched the surviving rodents bear large litters of twenty or more in the deep grass, saw young feed and reach adulthood by midnight, completing an entire life cycle within hours, so that the birds could feed again at dawn.

Walking through the open, Phylomon became an easy target for dragons. Tyrant birds, small and ferocious, swooped upon him three times, dropping out of the night sky.

Each time, ozone crackled around Phylomon, and lightning flew from his blue skin to kill the birds. It wasted terrible amounts of energy, weakening his defenses.

In the late night, he climbed some foothills and looked down on a small seaport with orchards all about, a town of many thousands, and he grew wary, kept to the rocks. There were no towns this far north, no human or Pwi settlements at least, and Phylomon realized that these must all be blood eaters that the Creators planned to unleash.

The town was not built of simple wood or stone; instead, the houses were octagon enclosures, resembling gray tortoise shells. Phylomon had not seen their like in ages. The domes were bioengineered so that each house was a living entity, like a coral formation.

The blood eaters had no windows to their homes, no chimneys. Phylomon suspected that the beasts needed no heat; the warm soil beneath them sufficed.

He hid in the shadow of a rock and watched.

The blood eaters worked in the moonlight, planting and harvesting fields, building coracles in the bay.

Phylomon could see no young among them. Apparently there would be no future generations.

Still, if the blood eaters managed to invade the human settlements, they could feed for forty or sixty years. The sheer number of gray birds warned Phylomon that the Creators would try to wipe out mankind in one massive attack.

Those who managed to escape would fall prey to the blood eaters; finally, when the last humans and Neanderthals had died, the blood eaters themselves would starve.

If men were to save themselves, they would have to shun one another, become solitary animals, suspicious, violent.

Few children would be born, and they would be teethed on paranoia, nurtured in barbarity, until the fabric of society unraveled.

Technology would be forgotten.

Any survivors would live a stone-age existence, stalked by the blood eaters.

If I cannot kill the Creators,
Phylomon thought,
perhaps I can rescue some small portion of humanity. Hide them in Hotland, on the far side of the world, and return in a few hundred years. Perhaps the Creators are right, and it is time to tear it all down, start over.

Yet Phylomon could not console himself with such a solution. Too many lives were at stake—lives that, too often, he detested.

Phylomon became weary, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift.

From his youth, hundreds of years ago, Phylomon replayed memories of things his father had taught him about the Creators.

Though Phylomon had helped program them, he had never seen the finished product.

He remembered his father, an old man who would no longer wear a symbiote, saying, “They’ve taken refuge in a system of caves to the north.”

Phylomon tried to recall if he’d ever seen a map of the island that showed the entrance to the caves. If he had, it had not been in his youth when seritactates still enhanced his memory.

Yet, he recalled the schematics of the Creators from a holo. Heat from their huge bodies generated power to drive their crystalline brains. Platinum neurosynaptic adapters fed commands from the brain to the biological portion of the giant worms.

To facilitate birth through their omniwombs, the Starfarers had built the Creators without skeletons, giving them a strong, flexible pseudoskeleton of cartilage.

Over that they had placed the symbiotes.

It would not be well,
Phylomon told himself,
to underestimate them.

The symbiotes, most likely, would protect themselves with beasts of their own design. Not for the first time, the Starfarer wondered at his own audacity. He could creep through some of the defenses the Creators had set up. The dragons and small birds posed no significant threat. One man could sneak past, while an army would merely attract their attention.

But beyond those, what would the Creators have prepared? Perhaps it would not be possible for Phylomon to even get close to the Creators.

Thinking such morbid thoughts, Phylomon drifted to sleep while light clouds blew in, blanketing the fields with snow.

He woke shortly after dawn to a silver sky with feathered clouds that still smelled of water.

The snow had melted so that the green blades of grass peeking from the stone around him looked as if they were covered with dew.

Below, in town, the blood eaters worked their fields and orchards. Many were walking a makeshift road beside a river that led through the trees into the hills.

Phylomon watched a large gray bird with the head of a woman fly along the rocky ridge where he hid, up toward a craggy volcano several miles away. When it neared the base, it dove out of sight.

That is where the Creators can be found,
he realized.

Phylomon set out immediately, skirting the road, climbing through rocks. Once, he stopped to look down on a small orchard where blood eaters had gathered around squat green trees to drink from dark-red fruits that hung like bladders.

Even at this distance, Phylomon could discern the red dripping from their faces, like children slurping the juice from watermelons.

Phylomon was grateful that the Creators had given the creatures a source of blood, for he had imagined herds of humans kept alive solely to fill the bellies of these monsters.

A little farther up the road, Phylomon reached a line of trees that were bone-white, leafless, and smelled of carrion. In all his thousand years, he had never seen such trees, so he skirted them, keeping from under their limbs.

Two miles beyond that he reached a second road that intersected the first.

He stopped. Both roads ran through steep gullies and were deeply rutted—not by wheels, but by feet. At the juncture of the two canyons stood a gray tyrannosaur, watching as blood eaters disguised as humans and Neanderthals passed almost at belly height.

Phylomon pondered the beast for a long time.

It held almost perfectly still, in the way reptiles will, watching the road with one dark eye. Up ahead the mountains were too steep for Phylomon to climb. He could see no way to move forward without descending to the trail. But that meant passing the tyranosaur.

He waited till the road was clear, then backtracked around a bend and climbed down into the deep, narrow chasm.

Just as his feet hit sand, wings whistled above him as another of the Creators’ messengers flew overhead, another large bird with the face of a woman.

Though her eyes stared at him as she flew over, Phylomon saw no gleam of recognition in them.

Marked by his own blue skin, Phylomon was singular—unlike anything else in the world. He feared that his markings would be known to the beasts formed by the Creators, but at least this one messenger seemed not to recognize him.

He crept up the sandy trail, and as he turned the corner, the tyrannosaurus stepped in front of him, barring his way.

It had just come out of a side canyon, off to its left.

The beast did not thrash its tail or lower its head to display its jaws. It did not behave like its wild brothers would have. Instead it watched him with cool, intelligent eyes. It was panting, as if weary or sick.

Phylomon could have killed it, but then he would have had to leave it in the road where it would soon be found. He did not want to alert anyone to his presence.

“Do not detain me, Friend,” Phylomon said to the beast, “I have business with our masters in the caves.”

The tyrannosaurus studied him, and Phylomon walked steadily past, up the winding canyon road.

When he had gone only two hundred yards, the tyrannosaurus roared, a choking noise something like a yelp.

The beast was angry. Phylomon sprinted ahead through the canyon, knowing full well that he could not outrun the monster.

He turned a bend, threw himself against a wall, and lay hidden flat between two protruding rocks.

The tyrannosaurus yelped again and rounded the bend.

It was not until then that Phylomon saw great streams of blood flowing from a gash in its neck. The wounds were puckered, smelled of cooking meat, and Phylomon recognized that they could only have been formed one way: the tyrannosaurus had been shot with a laser cannon.

The tyranosaur peered ahead, with its back to him.

Fear, I taste your fear,
Phylomon’s symbiote whispered.

Phylomon answered, “Strengthen me against my enemies, Gireaux, my old friend,” and the symbiote hardened.

Phylomon felt a slight pressure as his eardrums drew tight, making them more sensitive than normal, so that he could clearly hear his own heart pounding. His skin felt tight, like leather, so that no blade could pierce it. Even common bullets would turn aside.

Yet Phylomon’s skin could not protect him from a laser cannon, so over the years he had destroyed nearly every one of them on the planet—except the five that Tantos had captured at the battle for Bashevgo.

The Starfarer breathed deeply, considering.

Had Tantos come here to lead the battle himself? Certainly he must have, for no ordinary human would have made it even through the poisonous birds, past the patrols of dragons.

Nearby was a man with a symbiote as powerful in its way as Phylomon’s own, and that man bore a weapon that could slice Phylomon open like a razor.

The Tyrannosaur raced ahead, moving with surprising quietude.

Phylomon sprinted up the road, and began searching for a place to try to leap up the cliff between the narrow arms of the canyon, looking for an escape route.

This is the kind of place where one would not want to be caught in a flash flood,
he thought absently.

He turned a corner and found the tyrannosaurus slashing its tail and thrashing on the ground, blindly biting at the stone walls of the canyon in its death throes. There were no more laser scores on its flesh. It was merely succumbing to its wounds.

Phylomon ran at it, stepped on the beast’s tail, and leapt. The tyrannosaurus snapped at the empty air, and then Phylomon was past, racing toward a cave that opened before him, an irregular-shaped hole with dried vines clinging at its side.

***

Chapter 27: Ruler of Mankind

Once inside the cool shadows of the cave, Phylomon stopped to let his eyes adjust. The air smelled dusty, smoky and slightly of … hot bloody steel.

It was an odd odor, one Phylomon had not smelled in many centuries, the scent of many symbiotes in the same room. But there was a wind whispering through the cave, and he suspected that the symbiotes were far beneath him.

Down the shaft, echoing laughter sounded, snatches of conversation from some blood eaters. The monsters sounded disarmingly human.

The path ahead had been pounded as hard as concrete by millions of feet, and far ahead he spotted light from a torch, beckoning. Phylomon pulled his long knife and crept down toward it.

He did not have to go far to meet the first of the blood eaters. When he crept up behind three of them, the last in line turned and sniffed the air, somehow recognizing even in the darkness that Phylomon was not one of them.

The creature shouted and leapt at him, a jump of forty feet that made the beast seem to soar. Phylomon slashed the blood eater as it sailed overhead, then brandished the knife at the others.

They stared at him in the shadows, as if seeing him clearly in the darkness, like cats.

“What are you?” one of the two remaining blood eaters asked, and Phylomon hesitated, unsure whether to answer. “What are you?”

The questioner held a torch and appeared to be a fat dark-haired man with a beard and simple rough clothes. He had a jolly, innocent face, the face of a youthful laborer, the kind of face that Phylomon would naturally be attracted to if he stopped in to an inn and were looking for conversation.

The other was a younger woman in buckskin pants and a dark tunic, a woman who looked tough and rangy, the kind of woman he would want as a companion if he were hauling supplies through the Rough.

For a moment the illusion that these two might be simple humans was so complete that Phylomon stopped, wondering what to answer these new children to Anee.

“I am Phylomon,” he said, “the last Starfarer on this planet.”

The woman growled in the back of her throat, sounding like a vicious dog, and she ran at him. He tried to sidestep her, but she raked him with a cupped hand, a ferocious blow that knocked Phylomon aside as if he’d been hit with a sledge.

Phylomon stopped and held his belly. The woman mistook it as a signal that he was actually wounded, and closed in for the kill.

Phylomon stabbed her throat so hard, he severed her head from her body.

The man with the torch stood, watching the whole fight, then raised his brows.

“We cannot kill you?” he said emotionlessly, as if it were a mere observation. “How strange.”

More than anything else, those few words made Phylomon realize that this blood eater was not a human analog in anything more than form.

The creature threw back its head and shrieked, a great piercing cry that rang through caves like a war-horn.

Phylomon leapt forward and slashed its neck. The cheerful-looking man stood for a moment, smiling, still holding the torch, then crumpled.

From deep in the cave, thousands of cries issued from answering throats, thundering through the ground.

We are not alone,
Phylomon’s symbiote observed.

In moments, the blood eaters would issue forth, joined by whatever other defenses the Creators had formed.

Tantos must still be behind me,
Phylomon realized.

He snatched up the fallen torch and rushed forward, down the cave. He came to a point where the passage split in two, and above him was a fissure in the rock.

Down both dark passages below he heard shouting, so Phylomon tossed the torch, held his bag in his teeth, and climbed up the crevice, grabbing at small handholds. His symbiote toughened the skin of his fingers, formed little ridges to help him grip the rocks, and so he scurried up until he was dozens of feet above ground.

There he waited. Up the passage from which he’d come, the light of the torch still burned.

Like a magician who provides his audience something to focus on with one hand while his other performs the trick, Phylomon hoped that the light would distract the blood eaters, keep them focused on the tunnel ahead.

Within a minute, blood eaters began issuing out of the cave, hundreds of them, rushing forward. Phylomon dared not move, but kept himself wedged in the rock.

The blood eaters ran back toward the mouth of the cave, and then there were screams of battle, and the distinctive “whush” sound that a laser cannon makes when it fires.

Tantos has come,
Phylomon realized.

Phylomon clung to the walls, listening to death cries, the shrieks of blood eaters. Hundreds kept pouring past him, and Phylomon was content to listen to the sounds of Tantos’ battle.

He imagined Tantos, in the red symbiote he had stolen from Phylomon’s dead brother, casting flames. Tantos would be hip-deep in bodies, with more rushing upon him all the time.

The blood eaters would not know that he was virtually impervious to their attacks, but perhaps they would learn. They might wrestle away his cannon. Most likely, they would die in their attempt.

As the cries continued, great spiders began to scurry past Phylomon’s hands.

They were larger than tarantulas, with thick spines on their backs. They rushed past by the hundreds, and Phylomon imagined how a normal person might fare as they dropped from above.

A few moments later, Tantos came stalking beneath Phylomon, and the Starfarer wanted to attack.

But Tantos was not alone. Twenty elite Crimson Knights followed behind, secure in their nearly impenetrable armor. Four of them carried laser cannons while the rest bore more conventional arms and explosives.

They moved warily, watching all around by the light of ancient glow cubes that one man held in his hands. Huge spiders dropped from above but bounced harmlessly off the armor like children’s balls.

Tantos has succeeded in replicating the armor of the ancient Crimson Knights,
Phylomon realized.

Centuries ago, the Starfarers had made such armor for their law enforcement officers. Once, it had been considered a high honor to be allowed to wear the uniform. The armor itself was made from spun polymers of carbon and cesium which were lighter than Benbow glass, but nearly as tough.

The outer shell was not difficult to make, and Phylomon had always suspected that the slavers would someday regain the technology. More important, and more dangerous, were the modulators built into the helmets—for the modulators emitted electromagnetic waves in frequencies that could alter the brain waves of those nearby, sapping the victims of their will.

As a weapon, the modulator left the common man vulnerable to the Crimson Knights’ every suggestion. And so, among the Starfarers, only the kindest of men, only those proven worthy, had been awarded the honor of becoming Crimson Knights.

For hundreds of years, the slavers had been unable to duplicate the technology found in the remaining dozen suits. But now, Tantos had succeeded. Watching these horrors as they snaked through the dark caverns repulsed Phylomon.

Tantos had more knights with him than Phylomon had believed existed in the world, and Phylomon worried.

How many more could there be? Hundreds? Thousands?

Probably none,
Phylomon told himself.
If Tantos had had an army of Crimson Knights, he would have brought them.

Phylomon let them pass, let them get far down the corridors, then dropped thirty feet, landing as quietly as a spider himself.

He waited, curious.

Perhaps Tantos would kill the Creators for him. Those lasers could cut through Phylomon’s thin symbiote, but he was not sure that they would cut through those of the great worms.

He followed behind, walking softly, guiding himself only by hand as he touched the walls.

After nearly an hour, he lost the faint reflections of Tantos’ lights, and found himself stumbling in darkness. The smell of the Creators was getting stronger, and he heard the gurgling roar of a distant underground river, swift and strong.

Water. Yes, his father had once told him something about water. The Creators needed it in great quantities.

He continued guiding himself with his left hand against the wall, and after another two hours realized he had made a mistake—at first while following Tantos, he had come across a number of dead bodies, but now he was finding none.

Tantos and his men must have turned into another passage, and Phylomon had continued on.

Yet he could smell the Creators ahead, and he could hear the water.

Phylomon reached a place where the walls suddenly fell away, and he could hear a strong river flowing, almost deafening in its intensity. The burnt-steel smell grew powerful, and in the distance a pale ghostly light emanated from the walls, bioluminescence.

Sharpen my vision, Gireaux,
Phylomon whispered to his symbiote, yet the hazy light did not resolve. The symbiote was exercising its full powers.

Ahead, the walls and ceiling seemed incredibly high. Phylomon walked toward the water, found a strong icy river flowing through the cavern, and bioluminescence from the ceiling made the waters gleam faintly black.

Phylomon tentatively stepped in, testing the water’s depth, and fell in over his head, found himself tumbling, carried swiftly downstream through a raging torrent until he splashed over a short waterfall and into a deep lake.

Suddenly the bioluminescence became stronger. He’d found a huge, dimly lit cavern, like a world full of starlight, and all around was life.

Trees grew in the cavern, ancient and hoary, hundreds of feet tall, larger than redwoods. Yet they twisted up more like elaborate elms.

He saw giants under the trees—huge, sedate, misshapen men. Men who could be no less than eighty feet tall and that could not have weighed less than imperial mammoths.

They were ogres really—broad, squat, nothing human about them except their general form. In the bioluminescence, their skin looked pale gray, and their eyes were huge black pools. They squatted, almost unmoving, and with their long arms plucked giant fruits from the trees. The creatures fed more slowly than sloths.

A pale white luminescent moth fluttered overhead, with a wingspan of perhaps a yard, and lighted among high tree branches.

From those branches, grotesque birds cooed, larger than dragons. Of the beasts in the cavern, the birds alone consciously made noise.

Phylomon suddenly longed for more sound. The clamor of Tantos and his men doing battle with the Creators would have been comforting, and Phylomon wondered where Tantos was.

It had been two hours since he’d lost Tantos’s trail. Could his enemy have already found this passage, already done battle with the Creators?

In the water beneath him, a giant fish rubbed Phylomon’s leg, a fish so enormous that it could have swallowed him.

All the creatures in this cavern breathed evenly, so that their inhalations and exhalations sighed like a gentle wind.

One of the giant ogres grunted, turned his head toward Phylomon, and under the bioluminescence Phylomon could suddenly see the pale reflections of dozens of moist eyes, watching him.

It was strange, surreal, for none of the ogres moved except to follow him with their eyes—as if they existed only to sit in silence, enormous and bloated, to decorate this forest. A deer-like beast stood drinking from the river, perhaps thirty feet at the shoulder.

Phylomon felt small, insignificant, as if he were a child again on the space station orbiting Anee, wheeling among the stars, while around him moved the adults, massive and powerful and ancient and mysterious.

He floated in the water for awhile on his back, almost afraid to move. The currents of the small lake carried him farther downstream, until he realized that he was not in a lake at all, merely in a wide, deep channel.

For twenty minutes he drifted with the current, through the great unending forest, beneath mushrooms that sprawled above like houses, until at last he stopped, cast upon a dark shore.

Gravel scraped his feet, round and slippery. He splashed out of the water, crawling over clamshells larger than himself. He fell upon a deep bed of moss that grew as high as wheat, and there he lay, unsure what to do.

A worm came to him then, sliding through the semidarkness over the wet moss until it stopped, a hundred yards away, and it breathed upon him, the scent of hot metal. The worm was enormous, forty feet at the shoulder, and only the tip of its head showed.

Phylomon could not guess at its length. Its pale green skin was covered with strange bluish bumps, perhaps some form of lichen or colonies of mold.

“What are you doing here, Phylomon Starfarer?” it asked in a mild sonorous voice that moved through the trees like a morning breeze. In the darkness at this distance, Phylomon could not see a mouth.

Phylomon had not imagined the meeting to be anything like this. He had imagined that the Creators would be together, huddling in one large cave, and that he could use the deadly hover mine concealed in his arm to kill them all at once—or at least kill enough of them so that their power would be diminished, and perhaps they would be unable to fight the humans effectively.

But here was only one Creator in this giant cave, and though the bomb might kill it, the others would live. Phylomon could not kill them all, and he found himself sobbing, choking on his words.

“I followed one called Tantos, who wears a red symbiote, a pyroderm. He came to destroy you. I was curious to see if he could succeed.”

“Yes,” the Creator said. “He came. He and his men are dead. His machines of death have been destroyed. We squashed him. You may sniff the remains, if you are … curious?”

“No,” Phylomon said, certain that the Creator spoke the truth, and he was stunned.

Even at our fiercest, we are insignificant to them,
he realized.

The worm sat unmoving, apparently observing Phylomon for a long time, and Phylomon did not know what to say. In the dim light he could not see if it had eyes, could guess only that it smelled him.