Page a Day: Two Hundred Fifteen

            He shrugged. Right. The basic incuriosity of this world. “It does not matter, Cassan Vala. You sounds like a Historian. Either we will find these ships tomorrow and save this world and Jerem Cozak or we will not. There is no time for anything else.”

            He looked at me strangely and stood, then shambled off into the darkness toward his tent.

            I kept on staring into the flames. I don’t know exactly when Suriel showed, but then I never do. One moment I sitting there staring at a nice patch of nothing, my eyes beginning to droop, and he was there, between blinks. Exactly where Nogilian had been. With the way the Niskivim thought, that was probably supposed to mean something.

            Suriel did not seem entirely himself, though. I could see Nogilian’s tent through his chest, which meant that he was more transparent than normal. And he had lost much luster, not shining as he should have been.

            “You must/ go/ down,” he said, bowing forward. Long moments passed.

            “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I replied. “I already did that. It was pretty spectacular. It got us all the way here. Tomorrow, we climb this pass and see what we can see.” Apparently, I was still in something of a mood.

            “You must/ go/ down,” he repeated.  I tried another round of the waiting game.

            “Look,” I said. “I understand if you’re confused about time and causality and all that. Sounds like that might not be all that clear cut for you. But I can tell you: it’s done. We’ve all moved on. Bigger and better things, and I have to say I didn’t exactly appreciate the vagueness of the instruction. You’d think super-intelligence would find a better way.”

            He replied with the same damned injunction. Nothing further seemed forthcoming.

Page a Day: Two Hundred Fourteen

            And it’s all together, right? You finish up your time with the quicksword, you cross the quad to learn what we call the bolter or lightgun. Different areas, but it’s all made to work together, specialties cooperating in defensive force. So I look at Thaeron and I see: valkyrie, heatwhip, quicksword, each housed in terrain best suitable for its operation. This cannot be coincidence. Thaeron was a training world for the military of the entire Profusion, and it was made to work as one.”

            He scowled. My words were not incidental. If he was who I thought he was, the notion of unity would not be lost on him.  

            “It may be as you say,” he said. “I do not see what obtains from this.”

            I frowned. “Let me ask you another question. These famous Arks of Kasora, these closed during the time you call the Wars Between the Cities. Anything else go quiet about that time?”

            He shrugged. “Many weapons and resources were exhausted. In Nogilia, whole cities were destroyed.”

            “And in Ariel, the Well that healed the first Faith, that went quiet not long after he had found it, yes? And he was the one who ended the wars.”

            He nodded, squinting, clearly puzzled.

            “What I mean is, was there once a Healing Well in Kasora as well? One that would have ceased working about that time?”

            “The legends say there once was, yes. But what are you driving at, woman?”

            I shrugged.  “I can’t say, exactly. But your whole damned world runs by machines. Wouldn’t it make sense if many of them worked together, like the machines that came to help us from the deep?”

Page a Day: Two Hundred Thirteen

            We followed this one anyway. We reached the base of the mountains at just about noon. There were evergreen trees among the foothills. We slowed to a speed just faster than a man can run. The road wound upwards, using both switchbacks and natural courses to maintain its preternaturally even ascent. It cut across boulderfields, and I wondered what by what process it kept itself clear of those. It switched sides across several valleys, and simply let the streams flow over it. It climbed always. The day remained calm. The trees diminished. 

            By dusk we approached an area of cliffs and crevasses as the Road to the Sun edged its way along several glaciers. I looked up at the jagged silhouettes of the Spine of the World, still high overhead, and declared encampment for the night. I hated stopping, but would lose no more men to this endeavor. We cut and burned the valley’s dwarf pines for fuel. Nogilian had said the Cup of the Gods would not be far, a half day’s ride away.  

            “Correct me if my geography’s wrong,” I told Nogilian. “But we’re not far from Kasora.”

            Across the fire, he nodded. “The Cup of Gods sits in a pass on the other side of which is the snowfield that births the cascade above the city. The Shuni believed that the Road to the Sun once connected the jewel city to those of the plateau. But this makes no sense. There is no road on the other side, only precipice.”

            I shook my head, chuckling. “You Thaeronians,” I said. “Even when you see it, you don’t see it.” 

            His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

            I took a breath. “On Earth, we live in vast cities, the size of mountains, that contain millions of people on each level. There are only seven of them, probably only seven in the whole universe. And the top level is always the head honchos, the prince or dictator or oligarchs or whatever other damned system the city happens to have in power at the time. But on the level just below them is always the district of the military, a city unto itself, complete with facilities for training soldiers and their officers.

Page a Day: Two Hundred Twelve

            We left none alive. The formation was intended to scoop up as many of the scattered as was possible. The men carried with them the frustration of the Stair. My mood was little better, for Ki. They’d damned near cut her leg off. I’d had to leave her at the Stair, along with the artillery and five thousand men to keep it.  

         

            “In case it matters,” I’d said, charging her with their defense. “Don’t let them do unto us.”

            She had nodded, and known it for the gesture that it was. But five hundred pieces of artillery would make our pursuit no faster, and there had been no other logical place to leave them, or her and others while they healed. And after the Augers revealed that they could see through our chameleon, I didn’t want any more surprises. 

            Hence my maneuver on the eighty-ninth day. We could have, simply, ridden around them. They would not have been likely to catch up. But it’s always poor form to have an enemy on your tail. So except for one or two who actually broke and ran away in the gloom, no doubt to die lost in the frigid waste, we let none surrender or escape. After, we cracked the three relics they’d been carrying. We lost fifty-four valkyries and riders in the battle. That day, we were not nice people. 

            I thought about it through the afternoon. The Road to the Sun turned out to be more or less exactly what Nogilian said it was. A long ribbon of silver, broad enough for ten valkyries to pass, that began exactly in the middle of nowhere and went all the way to the horizon, bearing not a fleck of snow or ice upon it. I dismounted and put a hand down to confirm: warm to the touch. Profusionist metal, then, acting in a special way. 

            One wondered. The holy roads of the Shuni pleateau, Nogilian had told me, were altogether strange. Some joined cities. Some went to holy sites like the Cup of Gods. Some both began and ended no place in particular. The Historians of the world had been unable to explain their presence.

Page a Day: Two Hundred Eleven

PART SIX

Chapter Twenty

Elmy,

            We whooped them good, in the end, out there on the snow-spattered plateau. The five Auger legions were heeling and toeing it toward the southeastern horizon, so intent on their goal that they could not see the danger bearing down upon them. They put out no scouts and established no rearguard. They did not expect us, so they never saw us coming. 

            As I said, a delight in their own potency. I will go to my grave wondering how the most significant technological find of the new Auger age did not rate, from their point of view, five thousand riding machines, while a battle to keep a city they had held for the last ten years devoured every available resource. Was Jerem Cozak so piquant? Did the jewel city Kasora contain treasures unimagined, but also unemployed? Or did they simply believe they had time enough to accomplish all these things? If the Augers had sent valkyries, they would have climbed the Road to the Sun while I was still napping on the beach.

            Instead they died mid-morning upon an empty, wind-driven plain as flat as any tabletop. They were perhaps a watch’s march from the road’s beginning. The howling of the heavens buried the sound of our advent. The horizontal snow, just thick enough to obscure the distance, concealed our approach. My own scouts had reported five irregular columns, trailing long tails on the march, like ants across improbably white sand. I spread us out in an inverted crescent, ordered the charge from pretty much dead west, broadside. I swear they were still marching when our front line hit. They folded up like paper dolls. It wasn’t until I was mostly through the center column that the ranks tightened up and turned to face us – and then they were miserably equipped. Heatwhips do poorly from the ground against a charging valkyrie.