She had managed to tire herself. Dry of tears, Irene coughed and cleared her throat of all its dust and sobs. Done with panic, she caught her breath again and listened to the creases in the silence. A squeal echoed from somewhere in the distance, an animal or a machine or rocks giving way under pressure . . .
She sat up. She was not on Earth. So where then?
In her shock, she had only been able to dwell on the irrevocable fact that the magic had led her to someplace beyond her kenning, someplace inaccessible to the machinations of rational thought. Glancing around at the contents of the massive shelves, she recognized something in some pieces that she thought to call "technology." Then she remembered Peter's words, which were now a warning. ". . . the Library, so gigantic it's like another world unto itself." A world unto itself: pipes, chimneys, wheels, lenses, tomes, scrolls, crystals, screens, blades, bulbs, spheres, shapes, objects, things – she might be able to put a label on almost anything here if she were willing to sacrifice precision.
Her surroundings were roughly as Peter had described. Before her was a canyonesque corridor cut between two rows of black shelves, which towered above her, disappearing into the orange glow of the sky high above her. Her position was in the center of a four-way intersection. She surveyed the areas on either side of the corridor, and estimated that between either pair of shelves, there was around an acre and a half of dust and ruin. The compartments of the shelves were linked by staircases cut into the black stone of the structures. Some were cut for humans, or creatures of approximately the same size and locomotive style; but ahead of her one grand pile of steps climbed the full height of the adjacent shelf. Who could amble up those stones – each one the size of a house – and into the formless light above?
Irene stood. A place totally apart. Yet, as lucidity crept back into her person, it seeped into the canyon as well. There was some kind of rationale here: It was a library, was it not? As disconnected from terra firma as she knew she was, Irene could not help but to notice that, whoever the builders may have been, they shared a common urge with many archaeologists. They were driven collectors and compilers.
There was no catalog as Peter had described. Nor was there a guide waiting. The air did not stir.
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She left footprints behind her.
ReplyDeleteIrene reached the shelf that she had randomly selected. She looked upwards first, and then to the right and left of her position facing the megalith. Though the compartments were no way regularly sized, most were rough cubes, and they fit together like a puzzle of tiles. With a touch and a scratch, Irene determined that the structure was composed of some kind of igneous blend. Its texture ran from flint smoothness to the coarseness of fine sandstone.
The builders did not have only themselves in mind when they had conceived of this place. Irene mused about their intentions as she stepped up slightly and into the compartment in front of her: the design of the building seemed to accommodate storage for differently sized beings.
Tacking between intellect and instinct, Irene surveyed the compartment, searching for clues about its age or makers. It was empty except for a row of five tall stones, rectangular in form and regularly spaced in the back of the room. Each stone was as tall as Irene herself; each sparkled with crystalline fragments suggestive of silicon bound in mica.
Though the evidence had been all around her for some time now, the immediacy of alien life, perhaps nearby, suddenly seized Irene. The thought remained terrifying, but there was in her throat the base twinge of a giggle, for it was exhilarating knowledge to have: there was more to the universe besides humans, and more besides that! Perhaps the nonconformity of the portals and accesses was an artifact of successive regimes of construction? Perhaps what she gazed upon now had been the cumulative handiwork of eons of building and reshaping. By accident or intent, the design of the shelves had for Irene an egalitarian appeal.
She approached the center stone. Shall I touch it, she wondered? Is it a record of some kind? Is it an empty pedestal for a stolen piece?
"No," the parasitic voice commanded. "What do you think you will do with that?" It had the tone of a teacher chastizing a pupil. "Do you intend to wrap your mind around anything here? You will not."
Deflated: Irene's half-outstretched arm slowly dropped to her side. She glowered.
"I tell you, some moment many millennia from now, a being unlike you in ways you cannot imagine will step across time and activate those things for its own purposes. To you it's a glittering mystery and will remain so. Do not touch anything." Its enunciation was concise and composed, which only lent to the sinister confidence of the speaker. "I had thought to wait until you called upon me, but even this formality must be explained."
Irene looked over her shoulder.
"You require a guide."
The waste between shelves gaped at her. She saw the single trail of footprints leading away from her origin.
"There can be no lone travellers in this place."
"You are to speak to me just like that, and I will only plant my words like seeds into the soil of your thoughts. Why should it bother you?" the mental voice asked. "There is no one to hear you speaking into the air, no one to suspect that you are mad."
ReplyDeleteThough there did not seem to be any living thing near her, Irene considered that this was perhaps the first outright mistake or lie that the voice had told her. For there had been, and would still be, people in this place. Peter's account confirmed it.
As if reading her thoughts, the voice harrumphed before it continued. "And, oh, haven't I been useful? Haven't I already given you hope for Peter? Am I not giving you companionship in a place that kills the loner? And direction toward your goal – haven't I given you that as well? Listen, follow my orders. Walk to the end of this unit. Go to the corridor. Go to your right. Peter is that way. Do not dawdle – whilst you sat in your city, time here did not tick for-him-for-you, but now you are in the stream of things here, and you must not wait. Do not approach the machines and jewels you see. Go! Run to your comrade. Go! And keep him from destruction!"
She would have liked to have resisted the voice's guidance, but Irene knew she could not afford to do so. Dropping her defiant stance, she hurriedly exited from the pillars' compartment and ran to the edge of the edifice. She turned to her right. Looking once again over her shoulder, Irene could only feel ambivalently about the singular trail of footprints she left behind her and her telepathic companion. Did she have any companion at all?
"Run!" the voice implored her. Run she did.
She passed two, three, four of the colossal shelves – demolishing drifts of dust, throwing sand up behind her, passing a plenty of alien artifacts without so much as glancing at them – before she had to slow to a jog. No sooner than doing so did she feel the ground rumble. She thought that she might have been trembling from exhaustion or from some deficiency in the atmosphere of the place – it was awfully warm, and the air tasted suspiciously of metal – but the shaking grew more intense by seismic proportions and Irene knew that her weakness was only relative to whatever force was great enough to shake the library around her. "Time is fleeing us!" the voice cried. "The next field will have your Peter! Run!"
Irene bowed her head and gathered her dress to her waist. She clenched one fist around the knots and pleats of her dress, and she pushed herself to run once again, pouring herself forward, catching her weight on legs extended farther than before. Her gait was long and rhythmic. She bit her lip to distract herself from her pounding heart and the rasping sensation in her lungs. "Run!" She would soon have to admit that, even after so much labor in the ditches and life in the hotter parts of the world, hers were only slightly stronger than the heart and lungs of the average junior scholar or youthful countryside lady.
Yet Irene's will was far stronger than her body. "Run!" the voice implored, and she did so without stopping.
She blew into the next field of dust and the voice cried out again. "Now!" Irene nearly fell over herself trying to stop. "To your right, there is a shaft in the floor! Peter is down there – but do not go into it or you will seal both of your fates."
The shaking ceased.
Panting, Irene asked aloud, "And what else will I find?"
"The styrgae, Irene."
Having never really considered the bodies and lives of insects in any serious way, Irene was unprepared for her engagement with the creatures. The unspeaking million-minds which she now commanded surged into her consciousness. Irene had time for only one clear thought before she would be washed away in the deluge of being-insectoid: these styrgae were to earthly insects as the devil would be to a human being.
ReplyDeleteNo single word emanated from the mass of black joints and toiling jaws. A sea of not-quite thoughts surged into her. “Drives,” one might have called them. Beyond the compound eyes and strange nervous systems of insects, the styrgae were hydraulic creatures, propelled along on limbs and wings worked by the rapid pumping of ichors among internal sacks. Irene understood why they needed Peter. His vital fluids – his blood, his waters and mucouses – would be converted into these essential ichors. Their locomotion was synonymous with their motivation. Moving to feed, feeding to move. The lives of the styrgae were a circuit, a system of tidal desire.
Her mind could have been a basin for the way in which the collective desires of the styrgae lapped at the surfaces of its cavities. Irene had never imagined such vast lacunae in her personhood. The styrgae’s million-minds licked at a filmy residue clinging to these spaces, washing them clean, breaking up and dispersing the pretense of uniqueness, specialness, what could be called humanity. These lacunae – these lost spaces of Irene’s insect-self, her devil-self – now cleaned, filled with the waves of insectoid desires.
Irene fell to the floor and brought herself up on her palms and knees in a truly dumb, utterly ineffectual mimicry of arthropod movement. She scrambled to the lip of the shaft. Her palms left the ground and her forelimbs filled with blood. This insect-body, Irene’s body, remained bent and hovering over the dust at a right angle, supported by the hydraulic strength of the eldest ant queens. These claws, her hands, shook stiffly and vigorously; her knuckles clattered like castanets, issuing a message to the styrgae that she could not have pronounced with her mammalian lips.
Somewhere above him, somewhere above the racket of the stinging, gnawing swarm, Peter heard a gurgling hiss. He knew not what creature awaited him at the top of the shaft, but he had no choice but to move towards the new threat, to keep trying to extract himself from the gullet of the black mass swallowing him. He turned his head upwards and saw two human hands above him, waving and shaking like antennae.
The wash of styrgae fell away from Peter. Irene felt the tautness in her forearms ebb. The rushing tides of her body’s fluids receded. She saw Peter’s hand rise over the edge of the shaft. It was swollen with bites. Weakened, it quivered and flopped about as it searched for a hold. He made do with a handful of dust. His other hand appeared, slapping into the dusty ground. Slowly these hands and the smudged, dirty arms connected to them pulled a bleeding primate into the orange-red light.
Eyes and an Englishman’s face. Torn fingers grasped Irene’s hand, clumsily lacing into her own dirty, outstretched fingers. Another wounded hand found her shoulder and, moving like a crab up her neck, tangled itself into her short hair. Sapped of her devilish wasp strength, Irene collapsed into the dust, leaving Peter to heave his own weight out of the hole. Her back and arms pulsed painfully.
(Irene has expended -2 magic points and -2 sanity points in casting the spell. There was some trauma involved in setting up an affective link with the millions of styrgae, and it has cost Irene some additional sanity: -5 sanity. Rolls and rules more or less accounted for, this little episode will have some lasting effects on Irene’s psyche, which we can determine in email. Elizabeth, you can have first dibs on a suggestion for the shape which this mental maladaption might take.
ReplyDeletePeter is covered in bites, but, at 8 hit points, he is still relatively healthy. His sanity remains unchanged from its previous totals, including the effects of having died horribly at least once. Though the scar remains, Peter does not remember “dying”.
For defeating the styrgae, Irene receives a sanity bonus of +1. Her total in that department is now 58.)
As the clicking, chitinous tide ebbed from Peter's flesh, allowing the return of oxygen and his senses, it dawned on him that he had just been retrieved from the brink of spiritual and physical annihilation. He clutched Irene with a mixture of relief and remorse, for it had been his foolish pride that had led him into such peril, and as grateful as he was for the rescue, it seemed Irene had sacrificed too much to accomplish it.
ReplyDeleteHis clothing in tatters, his body saturated with cold sweat and the blood from hundreds of thousands of tiny bites, Peter clung tightly to Irene as she tensed and twitched so awfully, offering her whatever warmth and stability his embrace could give.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, gently rocking her. "I'm so sorry. But it's all right now. Irene, I'm here. I'm right here."
Agasthiya's steed still awaited him, but first he had to get Irene to safety. He wrapped her arms around his neck and hoisted her upon his back. "Hold tight," he said, and summoned what remained of his strength to climb out from that maw of hell.
The climb up would have been difficult under the best of conditions, but it proved truly Herculean in magnitude as Peter struggled upward. The odd slickness of the stone; the sweat on his hands; the weight of his savior on his back; the blood he had lost; and finally, gravity itself: all conspired to defeat him.
ReplyDeleteHe paused to gather his strength for another attempt, and to consider once again his predicament, as well as the conspicuous shortage of options.
The Frenchman had disappeared after reciting the yantra. Would the spell work for those who had come by the power of the Mirror? Even if it did, would Irene be capable of channeling the spell after the psychic exertion of warding off tons of malevolent beetles?
The other option was to continue downward, back through the swarm that had almost claimed his life. Agasthiya's steed, presumably, still awaited him; but what else?
"I need a sign," Peter quietly pleaded, though he suspected quite strongly that none would be forthcoming.
(Action continues in Lingering Things.)
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