Seven Earths

The sky wheeled above a great wasteland, hammered flat by the sun. To the west was salt-pan, throwing off the early light like an oblique mirror. To the east, a low line of brown hills rising shoulder-to-shoulder in dour solidarity against the levelled earth. They were morning-golden at their crowns, faint about their feet. Some cool lingered in the terrain’s hollows, a fugitive of the desert’s dreaming night, but the conquest was coming.

This place, as wide and empty as it seemed, was merely the Desert Onerous, the ‘little desert’, a antechamber to far greater desolations. To its west, lay the Jaiiger. The Jaiiger was an immensity. Its influence was felt on the borders of many countries, none of whom seemed improved by it. The Jaiiger was an incubator of terrors and wonders, a maddener of prophets. There, at immeasurable distance, behind veils of receding thunder, columns of fire still marched across the horizons and angels still touched the earth of the Sixth Planet, as they had in the time of Abrehym to sit, brooding, scourged by winds, in a desolation that matched the quality of their absolute nature.

Remember, remember, all excesses fail before the throne of God said the Jaiiger.

But that was there. Here was the little desert.

In the shadowed curvature of a dune, a woman sat, chewing an uncomfortable slab of siege bread. Her clean features spoke of wealth and good breeding, her body strong and clean-limbed, with a hard-trained roundness of muscle defining her thighs and shoulders. Her face was arrogantly beautiful, framed by a mane of chestnut hair, incongruously glossy, given the circumstances.

On her chest was a made-to-fit cavalryman’s breastplate of boiled leather. Riding boots clad her legs to the knee, scuffed on the inner side by hard use against a saddle. Instead of breeches, she wore a double-crossed belt about her hips, which cinched up a banded skirt of leather thongs, giving her the freedom to grip a horse, or close distance in a fight. Bracelets of steel were on her forearms and wrists, the left embossed with three pillars, supporting a lintel, the sign of her father’s house and, on the right, a rearing horse, which had no significance other than she had liked the look of it. At her hip was a sabre in a plain sheath. There was a satchel secured to the back of her belt next to a water canteen and a knife in her boot. Little equipment, for this trackless place.

Her name was Sessula Abiscene Molodre Dei-Palequine, of the Kismet Palequines and, if the price her infuriated father had posted for her retrieval rated less than her entire weight in gold, she was worth it, at least, from the waist up.

She finished the meal and discarded the wax paper, watching as the wind took it across the flat like a playful spirit. Presently, she wiped her fingers on her leather skirt, and stood. Two strides took her to the lip of the dune, from where she surveyed a labyrinth of erosions and gullies, inclining towards hills. The woman narrowed her eyes, absently tapping the pommel of her sword. It occured to her that the world was surprisingly large, when one found oneself inconveniently obliged to traverse it on foot. This accursed desert hadn’t looked nearly so intractable as she’d wheeled above it in her stolen wings. She’d turned and banked, as if she were Alemiphrene, mortal and divine, ascending the great staircases of clouds like a winged goddess, visible from the lumpen earth as no more than a golden mote in the far reaches of the sky.

Then she’d crashed the damned things, which was inconvenient and annoying and, she now realized with indignation, might even have resulted in injury to herself.

As she stood, contemplating, at a loss, but not overly alarmed, she heard the soft but distinct clatter of a rock being turned underfoot. She turned sharply towards the gully’s lower slope. Resolving from the tumble of rocks was the shape of a man, climbing the incline, no more than fifty paces from her position.

The newcomer’s body gave an impression of thick-limbed strength, musculature descended from powerful shoulders to wide hands. His hair was a black mass, tied back with thongs. Out of superstitious conviction, he never cut it shorter than two hands and, although he never washed it either, the thicket was rinsed enough by weather and various episodes of near-death-by-drowning to have formed matted locks, which he periodically oiled. At one time or another, frustrated female hands had attempted to unravel them, but to no avail, and now they stood almost on their own accord, giving him the ragged mane of a disreputable lion.

The man’s thick torso was armored by a military breastplate, similar to Sessula’s, cross-buckled and inter-sewn with wire for added strength, Katabarish infantry armour, which augmented on its center of mass with a bullet catcher, a device that looked like thick medallion with a slightly concave front, which would draw any fast-moving projectile to it, to be harmlessly deflected off the thick metal. About his waist, he wore a brass-embossed duelling belt, of dark leather, looped three times around and secured by its double buckle. To this was secured various items convenient to his profession, a coiled rope with a grappling rod, a leather satchel, knife, a short blocking sword called a knuckler-diete, due to the spiked guard that shielded its wielder’s fingers, and a longer fighting weapon on his left. His shins were protected by brass grieves that descended into heavy sandals, the toes protected with metal bars that doubled as weights for kicking at an opponent’s legs and torso in the lock of a sword fight.

His only other apparent possession was a large water skin, of antelope hide, such as the nomads use, slung over one shoulder.

Even as she recognized him, the newcomer looked up from his difficult path, saw her, and smiled, both with recognition and the kind of masculine effrontery she had always found infuriating in general and from him in particular. Her knuckles whitened a little on the haft of her weapon.

‘Ord, the Pit Fighter’ said Sessula, as if celebrating the arrival of a plague-bearing rat.

The man shrugged. It was true, he was.

‘What do you want? As if I have to ask, you panting animal.’

‘I was following you’ the other replied, mildly.

‘Why?’

‘Some idea of misguided loyalty, perhaps. We are comrades, after all.’

’We were associates in a band of glorified thieves. As for the ‘idea’, you have for me, you can put it back in your pants with the rest of your brains, you ugly scavenger.′

Ord smiled at this. He was ugly, at least, as far as he knew. His face was drawn in too-strong lines, as if some artist of the cities had formed him roughly, in mockery of the wild men of the wastes. It was surprising, however, how few females objected to it.

‘How did you find me?’

‘A little full of yourself, but on the whole-.’

‘I mean’ she snapped, beginning to lose her temper, ‘how did you find me in this fucking desert?’

‘Oh. Well, once I’d found your flying suit, tracking you was easy enough.’

‘I erased my tracks!’

‘It’s cute that you think so. But even if you had, it was simple enough to guess your course. I merely picked the easiest route through the ridges, assuming that the one a spoiled brat would take.’

‘Insolent ape!’

‘Did anyone else get out?’ asked Ord.

Sessula stared at him coldly for a few moments, then reluctantly answered.

‘No. The Surgeon’s dome began to burn and his machines started to explode. Some of them were shooting lightning, it was ridiculous. The whole place was sinking. I decided to leave.’

‘Yes, Snon and I nearly got trapped by the water as we were rescuing the prisoners. I noticed your priorities were admirably uncomplicated by concern for the rest of us.’

’I don’t have to explain myself to you. My life is actually worth something. And anyway, nobody knew what was happening by then. When I found the wings, I used them.′

Ord sighed. He’d found the wings, in the desert where she’d left them, ruined, the incomprehensible science that animated their spans stilled forever. A priceless treasure, a true asset to any adventuring hero, the power of effortless flight, smashed on the earth like a cheap toy. Staring at that sad desecration, Ord had resolved that if he wasn’t going to fly, he was at least going to get the girl.

‘What happened to our esteemed brain collector?’ he asked.

‘He fell in an eel tank,’ she replied, curtly, not elaborating as to whether a boot to the chest had helped him along. ‘Who keeps a tank full of carnivorous eels? Idiot.’

Ord sighed again. So it was all for nothing. Well, not entirely. A sulky, long-legged consolation prize stood on the slope above him, waiting to be gift-wrapped and returned to the gold-raining gratitude of her wealthy family.

‘Stay right there, you dog!’ she commanded, as he started up the slope.

‘Be reasonable,’ he said, ignoring both her order and her well-established history of not being reasonable. ‘Why not-’ but, as his feet reached the heavy jumble of boulders just below her position, her sword flashed out of it’s sheath. He stopped, his face hardening. ‘You’re testing my patience.’

‘I’ll test your liver’ she hissed. ‘With this!’

Ord appraised the weapon. It was a Cxescli pseudo-vorpal, a so-called a ‘singing sword’ for the high tone it made when the vibrating edge was activated by a trigger in the handle. Although not one of the immortal weapons that had survived the first civilization of man - there were only a few of those left in the world - it being a product of modern, lesser sciences, it was, nevertheless, fabulously lethal. The vibrating edge could hack through iron or brass, it went through flesh and bone like butter.

Ord’s fighting sense, built into his subconscious by hard experience, glimpsed the future in lizard-quick premonition. In an instant, she would tilt the blade to reflect the sun in his eyes - typical flashy trick of those Kismeen fencing stylists - closing the distance with a leap. Sessula could close like a tiger, an ability he’d seen astonish more than one of her opponents in the last seconds of their lives. She’d cut low, to fake out his defense on the left before turning the stroke to a lethally fast crosscut, mismatching speeds, as the school taught, to throw an opponent out of rhythm, knowing he couldn’t afford to block with his short (given that her unnaturally sharp weapon might go through the brass guard and take his fingers with it), and betting that his heavier weight would not allow him to jump back enough to evade the lunge.

Ord’s sandaled right foot shifted, testing the surface of the boulder, but his hands did not go near his weapons. He felt the uneven ground behind him. His position was bad. She had the height and the initiative.

‘What are you going to do here?’ he demanded. ′I can take you back to civilization. If you promise to put that away and behave.′

‘I promise to kill you is what I promise. Go back to civilization without me.’

‘Alright. I will.’ He slapped the heavy water skin on his shoulder, making it judder. ‘And I’ll take my friend here with me.’

Sessula did not reply, suddenly aware of her dry lips. Her mind darted to the empty canteen at her hip. Her defiance dimmed as she realized what he was implying.

‘Now listen,’ said Ord, seeing that he had her attention, ’you will be dead in this country in two days if you hold to your present, idiotic course. We are on the cusp of the Great Desert. The Great Desert- not that little dust bowl you Kismeens journey to, to shoot hare, drink under the stars and fancy yourselves wildsmen. The nomads don’t come here, and even if they did, their wells are secret and we’d never find them. Now, traveling by night, drinking six cups a day, and skirting that goddamned salt basin you just forced me to walk over, we may arrive back at the Ket in six days.′

‘The Ket is dry.’

‘The surface is dry. However, digging beneath the sand, we will find water. If we can make it to the river, we’ll live.’

‘And how far will we travel before you try to force yourself on me, you pig?’

‘We’ll be all the way back to your precious daddy’s palace in Kismet before I do that, but thank you for calling me a rapist. Anyway, you have no choice, so that’s that and I’m tired of standing in the sun trying to reason with you. What’s it going to be: go back with me or die?’

Sessula’s eyes narrowed in calculation. It seemed apparent that he was right. To wander waterless in this place was death. She’d been ignoring that fact because it was inconvenient, but the fact was not going to ignore her for much longer. The smirk on the muscular man’s face showed it he knew it too.

‘Die,’ she said, and turned up the rocky hillside, sheathing her weapon with a crisp scrape of metal.

‘What?’ he exploded, ‘You obstinate bra-’

But even as he started up the slope in exasperated pursuit, she turned soundlessly, leaping in the same motion, timing the attack perfectly, so that one of his upward-stepping feet was off the ground in the moment of maximum imbalance. Her sword appeared above her head like magic, grasped in both hands. Impossible!

If Ord had allowed his conscious mind to manage his reactions he would have been dead years ago, but his fighting instinct flashed a wordless realisation; she didn’t sheath her sword. Of course, she’d merely passed it down the other side of the scabbard as she’d turned, scraping the blade along the lip to simulate the sound. He had not even the slimmest instant for fury at himself for being taken in by such a simple trick, before she was descending like a hawk, her weapon coming straight down in a savage, double-handed stroke.

Ord’s body jerked, pivoting in desperation to create a space between its flesh and the lethal down-stroke that would bifucurate him to the waist. There was no time to draw a weapon, no time to leap back, all that was left instead was a lunge upward off his one planted foot, to close the arc, his right arm flashing up, hooking at the wrist, to strike her blade from the side. This was the most desperate move in swordplay, called the Balig-yur, - flesh against steel - an attempt to block along the flat with an open hand. He heard the sword chime as its edge was triggered, felt his hand sting from the vibration as if struck by a hammer, but the stroke went wide of his right shoulder and it bought him the blessed instant needed to twist sideways and down, not caring where he landed, striking the rough slope and rolling, the water skin, thirty pounds of encumbrance he didn’t need right now, battering him awkwardly. She was after him in an instant. He darted behind a dead thornbrush and, an instant later, she sliced the twenty-inch trunk in half, sending a spray of dry wood and termite dust up. She reeled momentarily back, coughing against the fragments, giving Ord enough time to grasp the pommel of his long weapon - only to have it slammed back into its sheath by a lightning-fast kick of her boot.

‘Ha!’ she yelled, and, this time, only the most desperate twist kept him clear of her blow. He threw a handful of sand but she ducked it, coming on fiercely, knowing she only had to close to end this contest decisively. Ord sprang off the slope and slid, she leapt after him. As she hit the ground, he couldn’t help but notice the pleasing motion of her body incompletely restrained by her breastplate -stop looking at her tits, she’s trying to kill you- then she was attacking again. He twisted under the cut, his hard-wired reflexes calculating enough space to duck his head and shoulders under the stroke but not the- ’No!′ yelled Ord, his horrified brain catching up with his body an instant too late, as her razor edge sliced the water skin from end to end. The precious liquid was thrown out, in a great, glittering arc, to splash amidst the jumbled rocks.

Their conflict abruptly ended, the combatants frozen, in dumbstruck horror, at this disaster. Ord fumbled to grab the edges of the rent antelope skin, to trap some of the escaping water, but it was useless. It was nothing now but a bag of wet leather, its contents lost to the thirsty stones.

Ord glanced across at the woman. Despite the situation, he couldn’t help but smile at the look on her face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you promised to kill me. Congratulations.’

‘Murder me and take the water. I should have known you’d try that.’

‘Yes, you should!’ answered Sessula, angrily. ’This is your fault, when you think about it.′

‘I’m sorry.’

They were working their way up the inclining maze of thorn-choked gullies, into the hills. They were already panting on the rough terrain, the sun brutal.

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Sessula.

‘Plants other than thornbrush. It doesn’t matter if they’re dead. Birds or insects. Look for any trails that might have been used, or footprints. Dry watercourses. It does rain here, believe it or not, and when it does, water might collect under hollows, where you can dig for it. We’ll do better when we’re under the cliffs and can hold to the shade. Once the sun is fully up we’ll need to find somewhere to shelter. I don’t know what’s over these hills.’

Sessula tried to remember what she had seen in her dizzy, exhilarating flight over the landscape in her half-controlled wings. These steep gullies, now aching her thigh muscles, had been little more than brown creases, running in loose striation southwards, along a great, white plane. She had an unpleasant recollection of nothing being beyond them. A great deal of nothing.

‘Once the sun goes down it’ll get cold.’

‘Pff’ said Sessula, by which she meant that she knew full well that the desert would get cold at night and that she wasn’t an idiot.

‘Wait!’ They stopped abruptly. Ord pointed to something his eyes had located amongst the indifferent jumble of rock. Sessula saw an object, almost entirely covered in sand, the too-perfect roundness of its edge betraying its artificial origin. ‘A nomad’s well! I knew this was a path.’

They ran to it and swiftly brushed aside the debris, revealing a heavy stone lid, about three feet across.

‘Saved!’ said Sessula.

‘Well I don’t know-’

‘Move over. I think I can get my fingers under it.’

‘Sessula -’

‘I know how to lift a piece of rock, granddad’ snapped his companion, hooking her fingers under the edge. She braced her legs and hauled upward, taking the strain down her center of gravity. Sessula was not short on strength, especially in her legs. The lid, heavy as it was, should have at least shifted and begun to pull free of the sand. It didn’t. Cursing under her breath, she reset her grip and tried again, again, to no avail.

Ord could see the problem. The cover was secured with a wrapping thong - the dusty rim of which was barely visible above the sand - but he saw no need to mention it, on account of his companion being a big expert who apparently knew everything. As she bent over the lid, flexing her shapely hind quarters and lean-muscled arms in the effort, the process had the added advantage of giving him a chance to figure out whether she was wearing anything under her skirt.

Eventually, she gave up in disgust and was informed - with no little satisfaction on Ord’s part - of the fastening chord. After some additional threats and remonstrations arising from this, the two of them finally put their combined muscle to the task and lifted the lid.

It became instantly apparent that the well was bad. A vile stench, an exhalation from a corpse, billowed up. Sessula leapt back, with various feminine theatrics, and went a little distance upwind, spitting and coughing in disgust. However, there was no smell, in all the Seven Earths, that Ord’s nose wasn’t hardened to. He stared intently into the slimy hole, hoping to see a glint below, but there was only darkness. He tossed in a rock but heard no splash.

Ord looked at his companion and shrugged. ‘Dead well. I suppose that’s why it wasn’t hidden.’

‘Now what?’

‘We follow the trail into the hills. If we found one, we could find another. There’s nothing down there on the flat.’

’I don’t think it is a trail. There’s barely a trace at all.′

‘Let me re-phrase; I am going into the hills and you can stay here and do what you like.’

Ord started off. After a brief assessment of her options, Sessula followed. She was beginning to have the uneasy feeling that her companion was right, and that this was actually a very serious situation. With the sun climbing into its pitiless vault, the desert was making itself felt. Thirst was already their companion, soon it would be their tyrant.

They pressed on. The ground rose sharply on their left, into cliffs of banded strata. By keeping close, it was possible to walk in their shadow. It was hard to see if the trail they were following was anything at all. The rocks turned under their feet and their bones began to ache from the effort of finding proper purchase. After a couple of hours of this, Ord paused. They had come to a narrow vale running south-east, steep-walled and floored with rough boulders. The Sun was strong on the ochre rock above them, but its floor lay in shade. There was no vegetation at all.

‘Look’, he rasped through dry lips, and pointed. Sessula saw it. In the hollow of the cliff, someone had hung an animal skull - it looked like a camel’s - bundled, by fading wraps of cloth, to two long femurs, hanging below the doleful object like ossified punctuation marks.

‘A nomad’s sign.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘I’m not sure. I think it marks a safe place, or sanctuary. Someone has come here, at least. That’s encouraging.’

They pressed on, expecting a laborious climb through the rubble-choked passage, but were surprised, upon turning the corner, to see it end. They found themselves standing at the lip of a small cliff, as if their ravine was, in fact, a crack, that opened half-way up a sheer wall. Before them was a canyon, about five miles long, that was more like an great plaza, bracketed by high cliff walls and almost absolutely flat on its floor. Squinting against the light, Ord thought that the hills ringing it had an almost symmetrical feel to them, as if they had once been a procession of great ziggurats, returned to natural irregularity through uncounted ages of erosion.

The canyon, if that’s what it was, was in the shape of a tear drop, their own position somewhere at the round base, the far end tapering and rising to a point, in the direction they had been roughly been travelling. There, at the teardrop’s tip, Ord thought he could see a gap, as if the walls of the great space narrowed into a thin, roofless passage.

‘Hm’ said Ord.

‘It almost looks artificial,’ said Sessula, uneasily, ‘but it’s too big.’

The sandy floor was about thirty feet below them. The cliff was rough and it shouldn’t be too difficult to find climbing purchases, but Ord was uncertain. He felt somehow uneasy about emerging onto that exposed area, as if they were two little mice, creeping out of a crack in the skirting board onto a great floor. Still, the place seemed to have a pass at the far end, and it was lying to their general purpose, eastward.

‘Let’s wait out the sun here’ he said. It made no sense to cross with the day at its hottest. Sessula gave him no argument. They lay in the shade of the high opening, running tongues over dry lips. Thirst was a torment now, it was already hard to think of anything else.

‘Suck a pebble,’ advised Ord, tossing her one, and she was too tired to argue. It did help, stimulating the flow of saliva, but she knew it was an illusionary comfort. They lay in the shadow of the boulders, trying to doze. The sun crept down the wall of the ravine, briefly illuminated its base, then began its counter ascent. Suddenly, Sessula started awake.

‘What’s that?’

Ord heard it too, an unnerving moan, warbling in a oscillating ripple, like a banner pulled up on the wind. It was coming from the far end of the valley, where it narrowed to the dark gap.

‘I think it’s the wind,’ said Ord, uneasily, ‘blowing though that crack.’

They listened as it rose, became attenuated, fell way and rose again. Ord thought it was just about the least welcome sound one could hear in an empty place like this. He felt the gooseflesh creep up on the nape of his neck, and felt Sessula’s body unconsciously pressing closer to his own. They stared out across the apron of flat sand.

Soon it fell away and the silence returned.

‘Two more hours and we’ll go,’ he said.

They settled back, each in their own thoughts. When the sun had shifted enough that the shadows were falling far from the western wall of the valley, they roused themselves, scaled the cliff to the sandy floor and set out for the far end. Neither were inclined to waste spit on conversation. The far end drew closer. Ord felt the uneasy sense grow. In the utter silence, each footfall on the gritty sand was as crisp as the crunch of snow, the cliffs following their progress with blind faces. He realized, suddenly, what was bothering him. This place was like an arena.

‘Wait’ said Sessula, and he halted instantly, his senses sparking. ‘Look.’

There was a human skeleton in the sand. It was clad in a few tattered rags, abraded by wind. It was face down, lying with its head towards them. The corpse appeared to have been flattened. Though it’s skull had been pulverised and partially blown away, save for the jaw, its torso had been preserved somewhat by the fact that it had worn leather, probably some form of armor, that had been pressed about and co-mingled with the bones of its chest to form a macabre bas relief. Ord skuffed away the debris with his boot. There were a few traces that may have been the unfortunate’s belongings, a mummified leather scrap that might have been a water skin, some shreds of cloth. The substance of the dead man had combined with the sand somewhat, in a pattern that he had the uneasy feeling was the outline of his innards, squirted, with force, from either end of his torso as it was flattened.

‘Well’ said Ord.

‘There’s a sword here,’ said Sessula, pointing at some remains a few feet away, a rusty mark in the sand, punctuated by an eroded hilt.

‘Looks like an Ezzulian scimitar,’ said Ord, ‘but that doesn’t mean he was Ezzulian. He was wearing some sort of armor. Maybe he was a ranger.’

‘How long do you think he’s been here?’

‘The desert preserves bodies, if they’re out of the wind. The skull and legs seem to have been crushed, mostly blown away.. a better question is what the hell could have done that?’

‘It looks like a big rock fell on him,’ said Sessula, uneasily, ‘and squashed him. Like an insect.’

Suddenly, the noise came again, louder and closer, from the tall mouth in the canyon wall. Ord felt himself startle as if his skeleton had just tried to jump out of his body. Without realizing it, they found themselves crouching, with drawn weapons and nervous hearts thudding, as if they could make themselves less visible on this open apron. The sound rose and fell, an awful, cavernous mourning. It fell, rose again, then attenuated into a fainter, higher note, slowly fading away.

‘Demon!’ whispered Sessula.

‘Don’t be superstitious.’

‘You don’t think demons exist?’

‘Of course they exist. It’s just superstition to attribute them to every naturally occurring, uh, naturally occurring-’

‘Phenomena’ supplied Sessula. She pointed forward. ‘Are those naturally occurring phenomena?’

Ord followed her finger with an unpleasant premonition of what he was going to see. There were more irregularities in the ground ahead. More bodies. Like the one at their feet, they seemed held together by the meager shreds of clothing, compressed forcefully into their substance, their extremities pulverized. Neither of them were keen for a closer look, so they crouched, warily, in place.

‘They all face the same direction’ whispered Ord.

‘As if they were fleeing’.

‘Yes.’

‘Fleeing the gap.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fleeing the gap we’re going towards.’

‘Yes, Sessula.’

‘The gap that makes the scary noise.’

‘What are we supposed to do?’ he whispered, in irritation, ’There’s nothing behind us and I told you, that is the wind. I don’t know what killed these men, but it wasn’t the wind.′

‘Unless it blew straight down on them, really hard.’

Ord gave her a look that indicated he didn’t consider her comment helpful. They scanned the rocky walls and the dark, vertical slot at the apex of their convergence. The sound had not reoccurred and they were in utter silence. That was worse. Ord looked back across the half mile or so to the wall. Despite the thin indication of their tracks, he could not now see the high fissure from which they had emerged. He had an unpleasant, irrational feeling it that had closed behind them.

‘Maybe some kind of trap,’ he said, uneasily. ‘The floor is regular. It’s flat stone, the sand is just a covering. Perhaps this place is some sort of ruined temple, and they.. I don’t know, stepped on a trigger plate. Set off some ancient defense.’

‘They were running away’ said Sessula, flatly, and Ord thought she was probably right. However, they could not now retreat. They’d barely get back to where they had started without collapsing from dehydration. And then what? Strike out in a new direction? No. This place was artificial, he believed that now, the faded trace of a colossal ruin. If there was danger, it couldn’t be worse than certain death in the desert behind them. The only way was forward.

‘I’ll walk ahead’ offered Sessula. ‘About twenty paces. You walk in my footprints. Then, if there are traps, we needn’t both be killed.’

‘That’s very generous of you’ replied Ord, surprised.

‘Yes it is. And don’t worry. Nobody would think less of you for letting a woman take such risks on your behalf.’

Ord looked at his companion and sighed. He rose from his crouch, weapon in hand. ‘Make it fifty’ he said. ‘I’d hate for anyone to think less of me.’ He turned and began walking towards the gap. After he had gone a little distance, Sessula followed, putting her feet carefully in his prints.

Ord’s senses were winding tight. He passed the bodies, dried and flattened, like ragged tragedies in a collector’s cabinet, sparing a glance for each, but keeping his main attention on the cliffs ahead. The ground was rising, very gently, towards the convergence, the point of the tear drop where the walls narrowed to the gap. They were little more than a mile from it, by his reckoning, having covered two thirds of the open space. It was hard for his eyes, squinting against the pale walls, to discern what was within. He advanced, each careful footfall a crisp in the dead quiet. The strange noise did not reoccur. They drew closer. Now a hundred paces, and he could see within, a dim indication of another chamber, smaller but the same flat floor, the same sheer walls, ribbed with ancient strata.

’Sess- goddamnit!′ he had turned to hail is companion and found her almost directly behind him.

‘I got nervous’ she said.

‘There’s another canyon chamber’ he whispered, ‘it’s like it narrows then widens again, and I think I can see another past it. ’

‘I see it too. They’re like beads on a string, connected by gaps. But the second one is much smaller.’

‘We’ll go to the left side and look around the corner. Come on.’

They set off, swiftly, in a crouching run, to cover the last of the distance. The cliff walls towered above them, at least three hundred feet. They came to base, feeling the sting of throats too dry to wet with saliva. Weapons in hand, they moved cautiously along the rock. It was rough, not the perfect surface it had seemed at distance, and peered around the corner. There was, indeed, a second chamber, shaped like a double tear drop, pointed at the top and bottom, and another gap at its far end. The walls were of the same height, and the roof was open sky. Unlike the great amphitheatre, however, this one was merely four or five hundred feet across at its thickest. Although of living rock, it was cut too symmetrically to be natural. The gaps, or doorways, were about fifty feet across. The floor was flat, unmarked sand.

Ord felt his painfully tight grip aching his hand, and forced his fingers to relax on the weapon. They crept forward, into the first chamber, feeling the tone of the air change, as if entering a the antechamber of a building. The corridors broadened systematically into the great teardrop-shaped chambers, linking the corridor connectors. A giant’s maze. But it wasn’t quite a maze. The passages linked and co-linked in some unseen pattern. There were no dead ends.

Sessula crouched and ran her fingers through the sand of the floor. As in the great amphitheatre, it was only a thin cover, lying evenly over a floor of flat rock. It was fine. She realized it had probably been carried here by the wind. How often did it blow strong enough to carry sand over these high walls? Once every hundred years? A thousand? She felt something catch between her fingers, and shook the sand off, expecting a pebble or rock. It was a tooth. Is this whole place full of pulverized bones? She glanced up, to find Ord’s worried gaze.

They walked on, as quietly as they could. Ord noticed that the walls were occasionally grooved, always at the same height, as if some hard edge had cut into the rock. The marks mostly occurred at intersections. He wondered what that meant. At least there was no question of getting lost. Their tracks in the sand would lead them back to the entrance, as if that would do them any good. The way the brachiating passages curved left and right, made Ord wonder if the layout was concentric. Was it purely symbolic? Or did it all serve some purpose? And if it was concentric, what lay at the middle? It seemed to him that they moved left and then in, left and then in, they would be moving ever-closer to the heart of the place. Proceeding on that theory he took a side branch, and then another, turning left each time, then walked for a few hundred paces along a parallel trunk passage.

Was it his imagination, or was the curvature slightly more acute? And there was something else. Ord broadened his nostrils, trying to sniff enough of the dry air to catch the trace. I might have been a wistful hallucination of his water-starved senses, but did he detect the barest hint of relief above the arid cool of the maze’s shadows, a scent of actual moisture, carried from the interior.

He stopped, breathing deeply, but it was gone.

They had come to another long junction chamber. The floor was even, their tracks the only sign of life. The silence was the utter, uncanny silence of the desert. Sessula could hear the pulse of blood in her temples, the miniscule creak of their armor and the squeaking of the sand under their boots, no matter how still they tried to stand. She begrudged every noise. She looked at Ord, who seemed to be in thought. The dread that had been growing on her since they came under the shadows of the high cliffs was shrilling below the awareness of her conscious mind, desperate for attention.

They held their breaths, listening. Ord wasn’t called Ord the pit fighter because there was more than one of him. The pit of the Sea Empire wasn’t merely an improving spectacle for those who wanted to watch their fellow humans die like ants, it was a place of execution. No one was supposed to get out. Until Ord, no one had. Now his preternatural instinct for survival was in perfect agreement with Sessula’s, there was something terrible here. A peril.

Suddenly, there was a grinding. As clear and shocking, in the silence, as if it was occurring right besides them. It was the sound of fine sand, being crushed into finer sand. The sound of something moving. Something that was tremendously, vastly, heavy.

’Ord!′ whispered Sessula, her face tight, her knuckles white on her weapon. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Sessula scared before. In the revibrating passages of the maze, it was impossible to tell from where the sound was coming, ahead or behind, but Ord found himself singularly uninterested in discovering its source.

‘Back!’ he hissed.

They darted back along the way they’d come but, as they rounded the previous chamber’s wall, they saw the demon.

It was a great wheel of metal. It had the dull lustre of copper, but the untarnished quality of gold. Its proportions were simple, a ring, three parts wide, one deep, a hole in its middle comprising precisely one third of its diameter, its sides geometrically flat, like a great, thick coin. It was about fifteen feet high, it probably weighed about a hundred tons and, as it completed its ponderous turn around the curving side of the junction, it surged towards them with sudden, terrifying speed.

So shocked were the two that they nearly died right there. Survival instincts kicking in, almost an instant too late and they threw themselves out of the juggernaught’s way, by coincidence, in opposite directions. Perhaps for this reason, the sudden divergence of its victim into separate targets, the thing missed them both and collided obliquely with the cliff wall, a thumping impact Ord felt in the stone.

Now it was coming around, not turning quite tight enough to avoid the wall, grinding another of those long grooves with its upper edge that they had noticed earlier. Ord saw that, when its metal was in contest with rock, it was the rock that gave way.

‘Run!’ he yelled, realized Sessula was already doing it, and bolted after her. They dived, instinctively, for the junction passage that seemed most opposite to the wheel’s trajectory, deeper into the maze. They emerged onto the next inward trunk corridor. Ahead of them it stretched, like a hellish race track, ten paces wide, a hundred tall, to empty sky, broken only by the periodically elliptical side corridors or junctions they had already observed. Instantly, Ord knew they’d made a mistake. The next one was too far away. By wordless assent, they made for it. Exhausted and dehydrated, Ord felt he was breathing dust, and it was ripping his throat. They couldn’t afford to sprint much longer without water. If they hadn’t both been supremely fit, they’d have collapsed already.

Ord glanced over his shoulder and saw the empty corridor receding perhaps half a mile before its gentle curvature obscured it. They ran. Ord glanced again. Nothing. He glanced again, and saw a flash of sunlight on metal, a great shape, rolling into view from a side junction, the long beams of the sun glancing off its upper curvature.

‘Go!’

Terror lengthened their stride in a way they hadn’t realized possible. If the monster caught them between the stone walls and its annihilating bulk, there wouldn’t be as much of them left as even those poor, flattened specimens they’d found outside, they’d be shredded into the rock like ripe fruit. Neither wasted precious breath on words. Time warped, with their vision, into a tunnel of pain. Nothing mattered but the junction. Suddenly they were in its shadow and dived into the ellipsoid divergence of the switchback corridors and linked chambers. Ord spared a glance behind him, expecting to see the flash of sun on a crushing wall of metal, the crunch of stone as it entered the junction, ready to throw himself left or right to save his life.

There was nothing. The juggernaut had vanished.

‘Stop!’ he gasped. Unable to say anything else. Sessula halted a few yards further, bent over in an attempt to drag enough air into her lungs, her eyes darting around the empty side passages that branched off all around them.

He’d seen it emerge onto the trunk from one of the connecting corridors behind them, but it must have re-entered the maze by another. So where is it? He tried to listen for its tell-tale rumble, reverberating somewhere in the complex, but could hear nothing over their ragged breathing and the thumping of his blood.

Got to think. Panic was death. He forced himself to sheath his weapon. With a sudden sympathy for the doomed, he thought of the men whose bodies they had found. He saw them crossing the arena, entering the maze. Meeting the monster in the same way he and Sessula had. Fleeing but not panicking. Tough men, professionals. A volunteer, to lead the thing off, selling his life to buy the others time. He saw the desperate run, back across the great amphitheater, lungs bursting, legs burning- fearful glances at the cliffs behind, growing smaller and smaller. They might make it- they would! Then, the glint of distant metal, something, emerging from the gap.

They’d gotten about halfway.

Ord realized that there would be nothing to stop the monster picking up speed on the flat. It was made to roll, in a straight race they wouldn’t stand a chance. In the canyon passages they had, at least, some advantage. It couldn’t corner as tightly as they could, or shed its ponderous momentum fast enough to avoid overshooting the junctions. In the end, however, it wouldn’t matter. They’d run about like rats, in this hellish maze, until either their hearts gave out or their luck.

Ord felt the mad imperative that had kept him alive in the pit, pounding in his temple; the creed of condemned; do anything. Do anything to survive. Eat shit, eat rats, kill your best friend, gouge his eyes out, do anything, anything to survive. But what? They couldn’t go back. The maze was death. There was only one direction that was still an unknown.

‘The center!’ he panted, trying to summon enough saliva to swallow, ‘this place! Something - at the middle. Can’t go back. No choice. Come on.’ He set off at a staggering run, and, with a groan, Sessula followed.

Left and inward, left and inward. By his calculation, they had crossed seven or eight of the trunk corridors now, the curvature was becoming acute. His leg muscles felt like they were melting. They must be close to the middle, whatever that was. Then there was the sudden vibration, the grinding of the wheel.

’Fuck! Go!

It had built up speed on one of the long, parallel corridors before suddenly swerving off on the junction, nearly - very nearly! - catching them as they crossed, with a sudden, terrifying emergence. Was that a sign of intelligence? Does it think? Or did it learn in the mindless way autonoma did? Either way, it could be bad.

Ord had hit the ground and rolled, Sessula went sideways. The terrible weight went crashing between them again, kicking dust and stone chips, juddering the earth.

‘Split up!’ he yelled desperately. ’Go middle! I’ll lead it off! Hey! Hey!′ He waved his arms at it as if it was a angry bull, which was stupid, because it had neither eyes nor ears. ′How does it track us?′ some part of him was still coherent enough to wonder - but never mind, it could, and it was coming around. In a moment it was going to pick Sessula or Ord. It picked Ord.

Ord looked across to the pale face of Sessula and thought that this was the last time he was going to see her alive. There was enough of him left to feel bad about it, for reasons other than that they’d never had sex. Then he was running. He cut left, heading inward. The rib corridors were now pronouncedly curved, he was coming to the epicenter, whatever it was. He heard the grinding behind him and didn’t dare a glance backward. He felt that, if it was too close to avoid, he’d rather die suddenly than see it coming.

He came around the last braciation and into a long, narrow canyon, uncurved, unlike the others. Without thinking, he turned rightward and ran, only to realize the long passage had no exits, only a space at the far end where he could see (blessed chance of escape?) sunlight and a circle of blue that might be sky. He turned and saw the monster emerge, slowing to take the corner, but now blocking any escape in that direction.

He saw that the distance to the exit, if that’s what it was, was too long, too straight. There was no space to clear the wheel and nothing, now, to slow it down. This was the final trap.

Ord knew was going to die, but he ran anyway. Do anything. Struggle to the last second, take any chance. He ran, hearing the thing behind him begin its acceleration. There was one thing left now, a final move he’d only ever performed, successfully, once. Ord was afraid of the strange power that the lyka drew up from the earth, closing a circuit between them and the sky. Ord had learned the secret in the pit, from a master, Malemeen, collared with unulinum, wretched and powerless, but still carrying the knowledge. But Ord’s grasp on it was that of a clumsy child, and only the desperate focus of mortal terror had allowed him to shed his conscious restraint enough to use it, once, in peril of shattering every joint in his body. When he felt the metal at his back, with the preternatural instinct of an animal an instant from death, Ord found that focus again, and jumped. For an instant his body felt strung with hot wires instead of nerves, lightning flashed from his for head and he leapt into the sky, as if propelled from a catapult. The lethal weight flashed beneath him, unable to stop, suddenly tearing at the sand-slicked floor of the canyon as it tried to brake. Ord found himself, terrifyingly, fifteen feet in the air, intensely aware that a broken leg here would be a death sentence and trying to fall forward, to roll the impact off his shoulder as he hit. There was a thin shriek of metal on stone and a tremendous splash - Splash? the sound made no sense to Ord’s mind - combined with a dull impact he could feel through the ground.

Ord came to his feet. His build was a thick as a polar bear’s, a fact he had relied upon, for years, to weather abuse that would have crippled an average human. He descended, after all, from a long line of slaves, human cattle bred for strength and endurance, though not, as it had turned out, for docility. Now, feeling his aching limbs and ribs, with dread, for the grate of broken bone, he found only bruises.

’Ord!’came Sessula’s voice, and he looked across to her, numbly. She had emerged from the side passage. She wasn’t capable of anything else, so she waved, inarticulately, to him, and bent over for breath. Since, Ord wasn’t any more capable of speech, he turned to see where their tormentor had gone.

He found that he had actually covered quite allot of the distance to the end of the canyon, in the final dash. He could see an open area, a chamber. A great window, geometrically round, opened in its far wall, aligned with the passage. He could see no sign of the wheel.

He breathed until he could swallow, hearing Sessula come up behind him.

’I- saw you jump,’she panted,’I didn’t know- didn’t know you were an lykarist.’

‘I’m not’, said Ord. ‘Not really. But it’s all I had left.’

‘Where did it go?’

‘Don’t know. Come on.’

Wearily, they walked the final distance and emerged into a great, round chamber. There were only two entrances, the passage they had emerged from, and the great, circular window, though which, the vast sweep pf the open desert could be seen. A hot wind blew from it, and the flat floor of the chamber was covered in thin sand. But that wasn’t the sight that astonished them. In the middle of the chamber was a geometrically perfect pool, about twenty paces square, sunk into the floor, without ornament or rim. It was filled with water that looked so pure it was nearly invisible, safe for it’s glittering surface, which was sloshing and agitated. The ground around it was wet, as if something had recently displaced a great deal of it’s volume.

As they approached, they felt a vibration, as if the thrumming of ancient machinery deep under the earth, bringing water to the surface from some deep region of the earth and they saw, in the obsidian-tiled depths, the glint of metal.

‘It fell in’ breathed Sessula.

The great, gold-lustered wheel sat on the black-tiled floor of the tank. Still spinning, but seemingly unable to gain purchase on the frictionless tiles.

‘Do you think it can get out?’

‘No’ replied Ord. They watched, getting their breath back, feeling the tremble subside in their leg muscles. ‘I think it’s slowing down’ added Ord, after a while. It was, noticeably. ‘It’s like the water is insulating it from its power source.’

‘What power source?’

‘How should I know? Maybe the earth’s influence makes power as it turns, or something, and it taps into that. Like a giant motor. Magnetism has an effect on water, I heard that somewhere, the moon pulls the seas. Something like that.’

Ord reflected on what he knew. Was the earth flat or round? One of those was scientifically proven and the other the laughable belief of savages, but he couldn’t remember which. Ord hadn’t even worn clothes until the age of sixteen, let alone read a book. It was a tribute to his curiosity of spirit that he had managed to cobble together a philosophical framework of the natural world from mostly contradictory sources. Sessula, on the other hand, had been immaculately educated in art, literature and the sciences. It was a tribute to her single-mindedness that she had managed to forget it all.

‘Maybe..’ She began, but trailed off. She had nothing.

They watched in silence, as the deadly wheel slowed. The silent turbulence in the glassy surface of the pool lessened and its level crept back up to the lip of the pool, as the hidden machinery refilled it. The wheel’s rotation was falling away geometrically, already half as fast as its furious initial effort. They stared, hypnotized. There was something desperate in its fading strength, its power wasted on the frictionless obsidian of the tank’s floor. For all that it was a homicidal mass of metal that had nearly added them both to its personal stamp collection, Ord almost felt sorry for it.

‘Can we drink now?’ asked Sessula, and the realization struck him that they had been standing before a translucent glory, water, cold and pure, wonder, a miracle, so clear it was like light-thickened air. Every parched fiber of his body ached for it. So intent had they been on the drama below, that he had not, until this instant, seemed to understand this overwhelming fact.

‘Well’ he said thickly, ‘we should probably make sure it’s not, uh.. it’s not-’, but Sessula was already on her hands and knees, drinking like a camel. Abandoning any further pretense of discipline, he did too.

Below them the monster expended the last of its inertia, it slowed, slowed, and stopped. The turbulence faded. The great wheel sat, in formal symmetry, like an abstract in a museum, rippled with clarid light.

After they had finally drunk their fill, a process that involved gagging as their shrunken stomachs rebelled, throwing up, and drinking again, they stood and took the time to properly observe their surroundings.

The pool seemed to have no visible means of entry for the liquid that filled it. Unless there were subtle holes or slots between the unnaturally perfect black tiles, they must be exuding it themselves. Ord knew there were devices like that, called syncronous surfaces. The Empyrians had them.

‘This is what it was protecting’ he said, looking around the great chamber, in awe. ‘Probably for thousands of years.’

Everything about this place spoke of Atlan. Machines that repaired themselves, machines that seemed to think, that persisted in their tasks, thousands of years after civilization that had built them had gone under the sea. Ord wondered whether the pattern of canyons they had run though, which he had first considered some sort of maze, was more likely to be a concentric series of channels for distributing this water. The black-tiled tank was probably capable of producing vast quantities of it. That would explain the lack of dead ends, the expanding pattern of their layout, their symmetry, the flatness of their floors. But why? A cooling system? To moderate energy through some property of the water itself? Impossible to know. The original purpose of the complex had gone into the dust, with its creators.

‘We have to remember this place’ he said. ‘Try to draw a map or something.’

‘Why?’ asked Sessula.

‘Because that thing is a device of the ancients’ he replied, indicating the wheel, in its imprisoning tank. ‘Some people would pay a fortune for it. The Peerless Order, for example.’

‘I’d rather it stayed there’ shivered Sessula.

Suddenly, the cavernous, moaning wail, the noise that had so chilled them on the approach to the maze, sounded out in sudden, shocking proximity. Before either of them had time to recognize it as the voice of the round window, catching a gust off the wide desert, at some precise angle, to generate the eerie resonance, magnified, somehow, though the canyons of the complex, Ord had nearly jumped out of his skin and Sessula had jumped against him.

‘Just the wind’ she laughed, in recognition. ‘Just the wind, after all.’

Ord realized that this was the first time he had heard his companion laugh, at least, at something other than someone she had just fatally stabbed or near-fatally stabbed, and he liked it. The blood was thumping in their veins, their heartbeats goosed by the shock. There was no drug sweeter than survival, no high more euphoric. Water they’d found, death they’d escaped, and it was hard not to be giddy at the reprieve. Ord’s heightened senses were acutely aware of Sessula’s long body against his and her lips close to his own. It seemed logical that he shouldn’t kiss her, so he did. As if some spring had been released, Sessula returned the favor, pressed hungrily against him. They ran their hands over each other looking for a way around the unyielding leather, finding laces and buckles, their tongues dueling. Ord ran one callused palm up her thigh and under her skirt, to grasp a buttock, finding the warm curvature to be pretty much as he thought it would be; astoundingly perfect. Sessula didn’t object, in fact, her own fingers were busy yanking his sword belt free and pulling his steel codpiece down, her own skirt already coming loose. Alright, so we’re doing this. Ord’s spare hand had been frustrated by the laces of her breastplate, but never mind, they only needed to be unclothed from the waists down for what they had planned and that was already achieved. As he glanced about the ground for some place that looked at least moderately comfortable to lie down on, he thought back to their fight, earlier, and wondered whether Sessula found it harder to kill men she secretly found attractive. If so, it wouldn’t have been the first time his winning ways had got him off the hook.

’Ord. Ord!′ said Sessula, suddenly.

‘Sessula-’ moaned Ord.

‘No, I mean- look!’ Sessula put a hand on his face and pushed him firmly off, turning his head towards the window.

‘Huh?’ Ord focused his attention in this unwelcome direction. In the heat-lucid glare of the desert flats, beyond the round window, a tiny chain of figures could be seen, traversing the wasteland from right to left. ’Wait- hey!

Despite his protest, his companion pulled away from him and was already reaching for her discarded gear. Up went the leather skirt, over the smooth-muscled thighs, the chestnut stripe of pubic hair - it turned out she hadn’t been wearing anything under it, after all, damnit - and, after securing it, she slapped Ord in the face. Getting slapped by Sessula was no joke, she put her shoulder into it. Ord’s head snapped around, a single star shot in front of his watering eyes and he tasted blood.

’What the fuck?!′ he yelled.

‘That’s for taking advantage of me in my emotional condition’ she said, primly, re-straitening her skirt.

Ord shook his head like a dog and squinted against the glare. The little line of shapes were bipedal. ‘Not camels,’ he said, ‘koloks. I think I can see a rider.’ He was having some trouble shoving his uncooperative member back into its armored prison but Sessula had already moved to the window and pulled herself up onto the ledge.

‘I think we can get down, from this side’ she said.

Still rubbing his stinging cheek, Ord joined her. He saw that they could probably climb down the tumbled cliff faces beyond the gap, subjecting themselves to only a normal level of peril, in time to wave the caravan down.

‘Come, on’ he sighed, knowing he should be feeling gratitude for this additional un-looked-for stroke of luck, and they began the decent.