Chapter 15: The Halls of Sanity

Days passed one into the next as they traveled. Except for giving alms to a few children monks living in a ruined library, they did not interact with anyone but each other. They saw a few inhabitants, one a woman picking her way with animal-like caution and grace through the ruins, a bow in hand and arrows in a quiver on her back. Another time they came across a man, freshly dead and recently picked at by scavenging birds. What had killed him was not evident. Most likely starvation or illness.

Bard used his gun to hunt from time to time, though he only had two dozen rounds to work with and no sure place to get more. One day, he found a very rare creature while hunting, one which gave them meat for many days of traveling. A deer, its antlers gleaming an eerie green color as it stood on a slab of stone staring at him. It was skinny, tough and Bard was sorry to destroy it when there was so few around. He knew that it must have had a hard life, hunting for mosses and sprouts in a city where most of those things were dead. It made its meat tough. But it was a great windfall for the travelers, who could cover more ground when they did not have to stop to hunt every day. It also saved on bullets.

Bard pressed Loran from time to time about the unusual skills she had exhibited, but she would not give him more of an answer than that it was a gift. He knew that she had foreseen the Greenspark, and he accepted that more easily as clairvoyance or prophesy, but the things she had accomplished more recently were a deeper mystery to him.

Finally, they reached a place where the buildings opened out into a large courtyard. Dry, broken fountains lay in each corner of it. The empty pedestal of a statue stood in the center. Whatever had been on the pedestal was destroyed, laying in fist-sized chunks of stone around the middle of the courtyard. The buildings which ringed the place were tight-packed, most of them fronted by covered colonnades. Some of the pillars were upright, others lay at odd angles on the ground or tipped against their brethren.

Loran pulled the car to a halt on the outer edge of the courtyard, in the shade, giving the steering wheel a small caress of satisfaction. “We’ve made it. His car has done well for us.”

Bard nodded. “Is this the place we’ll meet your friends?”

“Elisha should be here soon.” Loran frowned up at the sky for a moment, where the sun hung a little past noon. “I don’t know if Jerome will be able to make it for a few days. No one else was willing to come.”

Secretly excited by the idea of new people to meet, ones that were not scorch-mad or cruel, Bard simply nodded a second time at her words. He was learning to be more serious and calm, more grave, as time went on. As the hunter of their little group and, he sometimes like to think, the main protector, he felt a weight of responsibility. Out from under the kindly but indulgent guardianship of Dick Chelsea he was growing up fast.

Bard got out to scout around the area, peering into moldering buildings and charred corners to make sure they were not being observed by man or beast. Loran sat in the car with the door open, watching the sun and a few wispy clouds moving through the sky. Her face was impenetrable, expression a gently closed book.

When he was satisfied that they were alone, Bard returned and reached into the back to take out his old sack of provisions. There was nothing to eat left in it and the shirt was both torn and soiled from use on the Rabiter wound on his toe. That was well healed now, under Loran’s ministrations. She seemed to have tins of salve and bandages hidden in her robe like thorns on a rose bush.

But there was still the two books in the sack. Drifter’s dictionary and Bard’s own book. Taking out the former, he weighed in in his hand for a moment. He felt Loran’s eyes on him as he leaned down to shove it back in the glove compartment, where it belonged.

“He never did show me how to play his game,” he commented as he straightened up.

Loran snorted lightly. “It was simple. He had memorized almost the whole book and would have a second person quiz him on the meanings of words. Strange amusement for a loner.”

With a shrug, Bard moved over to sit in the sun against a car tire, pulling out his book. It was wide and thick, but when he opened it, only half of the pages were filled in. A simple pen lay clasped in its leaves, ink half gone. One page beside it was blank, but the other had a poem scrawled down it in neat, flowing script.

'Where river meets the apple tree,

Darkness waits and grapples me.

Flowing water, endless hair,

Takes me down to death’s dark lair.

Sweet scent of autumn fruit awaits,

Down beyond the water’s gates.’

The poem was unfinished. As he had a few times before, Bard lifted the pen, held it for a moment and then sighed and lay it back.

“Did you write that?” Loran’s voice broke in on his quiet thoughts. He jumped and looked up to find her standing beside him. He hadn’t heard her moving. The book was shut quickly and firmly by his hands.

“No, it’s Dick’s. A book of poems. He didn’t finish it.”

“But asked you to?” Loran raised an eyebrow.

Bard shrugged, returning, “he said that I could write in it whatever I wanted to. I guess...yes, I thought I could finish it for him. But I’m just not much of a poet.”

“You could try prose,” Loran suggested, “it is easier to start and has it’s own merits.”

“Maybe.” Bard stood up, putting the book back in the sack. He didn’t really want to discuss it. Loran seemed to know this, but she added one more sentence.

“If nothing else, you can always write what you see around you, for others to read one day.”

Bard cast his eyes over the broken structures, void of life, and the sky with its dust-enshrined sun. He did not see anything that was worthy of note, anything that he would want to remember.

To pass the time, waiting for Loran’s friend to arrive, Bard started a small fire and began to dry strips of the last deer meat over it. It had stayed good for a surprising amount of time in the cool air, but they had begun to taste a touch of oddness in the pieces that had not been smoked before. Especially where it was fattiest.

He was spitting the thin strips on a stick when he heard a discordant noise in the distance. At first, he paid little attention to it, because it was so far away. But after a few moments he noticed that the sound was coming nearer. Bard jumped to his feet. It was a sort of chugging, clanging noise, echoing eerily through the city. He could distinctly hear light crashes and slides coming after it, from walls that could not withstand the resonance of the sound. It was like a giant monster growling through the streets, advancing towards them invisibly.

The noise began to reverberate around the courtyard, bouncing off of the buildings around them. Bard grasped his knife tightly, looking wildly towards Loran for an explanation. She stood calm, hands tucked in sleeves.

“What is it?” he shouted, pictures of griffins and dragons swirling around his head.

“Elisha.” Loran stepped closer so that he could hear her over the noise. “I told you he has a conveyance, remember? But it is steam-powered, not crystal fuel.”

At that moment a vehicle came into view down a narrow alley, filling it with steam, smoke and its own gleaming body. Bard had never seen anything like it, except for perhaps pictures in old manuscripts of inventor’s wild ideas. It was built like a long, low truck with a huge, round boiler for a nose and a tall cab perched up above it. Behind the cab, a pair of stacks reached towards the sky, smoke billowing up from them and soot falling down in a soft snow. Gleaming rods turned around at the wheels, steam whistled from between them and the back of the truck seemed to be taken up with a tiny house. It was a shack made of grimy rags, sheets of half-rusted metal and corrugated roofing, but a house nonetheless.

The sides of the house swayed and clanked as the truck rolled roughly to a stop a few yards away. One of the stacks was loose, also clanging and shaking wildly on its stem. The windows of the truck were grimy with soot and cracked, one of them missing a small triangle piece. Bard did not know how the whole thing stayed together as it went over bumps in the road.

It sighed to a stop and puffs of steamy air shot out as some sort of brake was set. One of the doors opened and a man hopped nimbly to the ground. He was not tall, nor large, but his arms were well-muscled and slick with sweat. He wore a sort of leather apron, tied around at the waist with a greasy belt containing a set of instruments and tools. Large leather gloves encased his hands until he shucked them off as he drew nearer. Red hair waved above his head in an unruly tuft. Stubble the same color covered his narrow chin.

“Loran!” he had a surprisingly high voice, with a touch of foreign accent to it. “And ye have a friend as well. I’m Elisha, boy, Elisha McDon.”

He pronounced the last name with a peculiar drawl to it, so that it sounded more like 'McDoon’.

Bard found his hand being squeezed inside one worked and scarred until it was almost thick leather itself. Then the newcomer turned back to Loran quickly.

“You’re looking none the worse for travelin’ in this ruined world. No one’s spitted ye for 'longpig’ or taken you captive yet, 'ay?”

“Actually, I was taken captive once, by the Falel gang,” Loran’s tone was at odds with his, chilly and liquid. “But I was rescued by a most...interesting man. His story is caught up with that of the box. I’ll explain more, later. This is Bard. He’s also protected me from capture, recently. There are things in this world becoming stranger than ever, Elisha.”

“Well, it never was quite a straight path, was it?” The man smiled, his eyes squinted back in folds of leathery skin so that one could hardly see the green twinkling out. “Good job, young’un, for watching her. She’s a lady with some talent and a will of her own, 'ay?”

Loran raised one eyebrow in a mixture of disapproval and amusement. “Come, dispense with your pleasantries, my friend. We have serious business at hand. Let me show you the object we found.”

“Bring it into the shack.” Elisha nodded towards the house on the back of his rig. His tone was graver now, meeting her request. “It’s where serious, quiet-like business belongs.”

As she went to fetch the cube, he showed Bard the steps at the back of his truck, leading up into the shack. There was a vehicle door hung at the top of the steps, giving entrance into the place.

“My big steamy doesn’t mind the weight,” he explained, “and it saves me havin’ to find a safe place to sleep every night.”

But when Bard went into the structure, he was surprised Elisha could sleep in it at all. There were tools on hangers and benches around all of the walls, metal bins shoved under the benches and an intact wooden table set in the center of the floor, with bar-stools bolted down around it. Everything was a little greasy, grimy and dusty, with the polished look of well-used objects. Other than the table, the only thing which looked like it belonged in a normal house was a sort of wood stove set up against the wall, with a chimney connecting into the main stacks through a window. But as it was made of a small metal drum cut down in size, with a door inserted in the front, it did not appear very homey, either. A pile of split wood and kindling lay next to it, all with charred edges. Bard wondered how many dead trees the inventor must go through to keep his truck running, let alone cook his meals.

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Loran came in then and they each took a stool, perching around the table. Loran lay the cube on the heavy wooden slab, putting a hand on top to forestall the man from touching it.

“This has an odd story,” she said carefully, “one which you should hear before trying to find out what it is made of or take it apart. Because, if my theory is correct, it may contain something dangerous. Even explosive.”

“Oh, 'ay?” Elisha was leaning forward, looking at the black cube curiously. “I’m all ears, m’dear. But it doesn’t look like it’s meant to be opened. What might it contain that is so dangerous?”

Loran bowed her head, face shaded by the hood. “If my idea is right, then this might just be a form of projectile. One to be shot high into the atmosphere before exploding outwards in either many or a single falling form of destruction. The Greenspark.”

Elisha leaned back in is chair and looked at her through his squinted eyes. “That’s a tall statement, Loran. If it’s true, then the Greenspark fire disaster was due to human malice. But I see one problem already. It would take millions of these projectiles, nay, billions, to cause Greenspark all over the world.”

“That is true.” Loran agreed with a nod of her head. “I don’t know if there would be other launchers or if the machine this came from was the only one. It might be nothing but a wild leap of the imagination. Hear the story and you may judge for yourself what to do next.”

While Bard and Elisha listened, she began to sketch briefly her journey with Drifter, what she had learned in the library and what happened afterwards.

---

The bed was hard and cold. Drifter came to a consciousness of it gradually. Sometime in the near past there had been a period of intense pain and odd sensations, all of it blurred by a sense of semi-wakefulness. He had not been able to see and his mind had not worked properly. Everything had been like a mad dream. Now, he realized with growing consciousness that he was laying on something firmly padded, his eyes were closed and he was very tired. Weariness pervaded his whole being like a malignant ghost.

Prying his eyes open, he found his vision grainy and blurred. A white surface was somewhere high above him, lit flatly as if by electricity. He blinked and things cleared slowly until he could make out that he was lying close to a wall of hard, gray material. It was not a shade of gray that could be given any name. Descriptions slid away from it. The pale surface above was a ceiling, perhaps ten feet up. A bar of white light gave out a soft, ambient glow.

He raised a hand with some effort and ran it over the smooth wall. It felt like metal, or maybe polished stone. He let the hand fall on his chest wearily and closed his eyes for a moment. He was too disoriented to untangle the mess at the time. It was only a sense of wrongness that came to him when he tried, as if he had made a plan and it turned out less cohesive than anyone alive had intended.

A clicking sound, very soft, made Drifter open his eyes again. Tiny noises like leaves skating on cement came to his ears. When he turned his head it was to see that a door had come open in the wall of the bare room he lay in. Three figures were entering, none of them with the appearance of humans. All were tall, angular and had skin that was truly, purely white. Their faces lacked any features but dark eyes and the light seemed to trickle right through them. Masses of snowy hair swirled around them, alive without a breeze. The only color they bore was that each wore a sort of stiff vest, trimmed in metallic tape. These were made in bright colors, green, crimson and golden-brown.

Drifter stared at them and a word impacted in his brain. Phantoms. He drew away from them against the wall, without the strength to react in any other way.

The wraiths lined up in front of his bed, staring emptily with their dark eyes. Slowly, each fell to its knees and bowed to him. Their hair waved over their inclined heads, seaweed in the ocean.

“Human”

“Human”

“Human”

Three voices, notes on a harp, rang in his head. With a vicious suddenness Drifter remembered everything. His mission, the opening of the gate, the blue energy that had struck him...

“Are...you...angels?” His voice was distant, harsh in his own ears. He sat up a tiny distance, holding out a hand towards them. It was a helpless gesture. It wasn’t until he made it that he noticed his right hand was different. The wrist glittered silver, coarsely shaped like flesh, made of hard metal. His hand was flexible metal fingers, set around a dot of glowing blue material in the palm. It seemed to be a glass lens, lit from behind. He was not sure. At first he was uncertain that it could even be his own hand. But when he curled his fingers the dark metal replicas followed the motion. He bent his elbow to hold the hand close, staring at it in disbelief. Something dark and cold tore at the edge of his mind. They had changed him.

As he sat trying to take in the appendage that was now his own, the three wraiths rose and left him, door closing with a soft hiss.

It seemed all a dream, something on the verge of insanity.

---

Bard listened to most of the story, but he did leave at one point to pick up his skewers of meat and set them in the car for later cooking. When he returned, Loran was almost at the end of her recital. Elisha had a large mug of something steaming in front of him, which he sipped contemplatively as he listened. Loran had a small teacup of herbal tea. Bard was offered another as he came in.

“Well, this is all most puzzling,” Elisha said when Loran was through her story. “But it seems to me there is only one thing to do until Jeroam gets here.”

He lay his big hands on the black cube of metal. “Take it apart!”

Loran nodded. “Carefully. Then once our friend comes?”

“Go back to the gate of course, m’dear.” Elisha said gravely. “And find out what that machine is all about. Not to mention the portal, passageway, whatever it is sitting in, that is in this world but not of this world.”

Immediately, he began to run his fingers over the box, looking for crack or joint. But every corner was sealed, every edge a smooth, rounded line. After establishing this fact, he tapped the object with his fingers, leaning over to listen closely to it. One long arm reached out and grasped a hammer from the bench, which he used to tap on it as well.

“It’s definitely hollow,” he declared, “though not empty.”

“How can you tell?” Bard asked, leaning forward over the table with interest.

“Resonance.” Elisha hit it a little harder with the hammer. It made a ringing sound, but it was dampened as if something were touching the walls on the inside.

The tinkerer shrugged. “Besides the fact that it is too heavy for its size, if the metal is thin and the inside hollow. I’m not sure what sort of material this is, it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve seen before, ye see, but I don’t think the metal itself weighs more than steel or is thicker than about so much.”

He indicated about a third of an inch with his fingers. “But it is very stiff for its thickness, ye understand. And strong.”

Loran nodded to all of these suppositions and bits of information. “Can you open it?”

“Oh, 'ay.” Elisha’s expression became surprised. “Of course I can. The thing is to do it without harmin’ or settin’ off anything inside.”

“Well.” Loran gave a dry smile. “Can you do that, then?”

With a promise to try his best, the inventor picked up the box and set it on the bench which ran around the room. But before he would work on the object, he insisted that they all sit and have dinner with him. At the mention of 'dinner’ Bard looked up through a gap in the flapping fabric of the roof and saw that the sky beyond was starting to darken. He went to get the last of their venison, looking up again at the sky turning bruised purple with the black shades of buildings standing against it. He saw a star appear, twinkling in the misty haze, and wondered if there really were other worlds out there at all like their own. Not nearby, perhaps, but so far off that the most powerful space craft constructed before the disaster would take years and years to reach it.

With a sigh, he went to fetch the meat. Whoever lived on those worlds was lucky to be so far away from this one.

When he returned, Elisha was cutting up potatoes to put in a pot and boil. Bard’s eyes lit up and he swallowed hungrily. It had been months since he had potatoes, the last being when he and Dick had harvested the few small ones growing in the shielded dome, carefully saving the best to replant. Before that, he had vague remembrances of eating them regularly before the Greenspark. But, though he had been a dozen years old when the disaster struck, everything from the time before the fires was somewhat blurred in his memories.

The venison, they roasted over the open fire in the stove, which radiated heat until the little shack was more than cozy. A smell of scorching oil and dust came with it, but the passengers did not care too much. It was nice to sit on the faded bar stools around the heavy table and smell dinner cooking, talking quietly about things past and to come. It was homey.

Elisha told them a little about his time in ruined Apex. Like Loran, he had been seeking answers about why the Greenspark had fallen and the phantoms appeared. He had not learned much new having to do with the former, but phantoms he had run across multiple times.

“Once I saw one, just in the shades of evenin’ like this,” he said, knotting his worn knuckles together in a double fist. “Sitting in the middle of the road it was, legs crossed like a child. In front of it were a series of pebbles, lined up on the ground. It seemed to be playing a game with them, or counting them over like a miser. Its strange shape seemed to waver in the twilight and its hair billowed around it without a breeze. When I got nearer--”

“You went towards it?” Bard interrupted with surprise.

“Aye. I wanted to know what it was, you see. Maybe if I got closer to it I could ask it some questions. No one has ever tried that before, as far as I know.” With a quirked smile Elisha went on. “Before I could get near enough the white being just jumped to its feet and made a loud, ringing noise like a bell. Then it ran off, or perhaps 'glided’ is a better word. Floated away faster than I could follow and disappeared into a bunch of old buildings.”

“They act very strangely,” Loran murmured, dark eyes reflecting things far away and unseen.

Soon the dinner of salted, boiled potatoes, toasted bread hunks and venison was ready. They ate it on the table as darkness fell outside, Elisha lighting a bright oil lamp which was suspended from the ceiling. The yellow light, walls (no matter how flimsy they were) and presence of multiple people made Bard feel safer and more cozy in the little shack than he had since leaving the Academy sector.

After supper Elisha began getting out various cutting tools from drawers under his bench. Everything from a cold chisel to a hacksaw was laid out on the work surface as neatly as a surgeon’s tools. Bard leaned on the bench nearby, watching with a growing interest in not only the box itself, but the tools used to work on it. Elisha started out by simply scraping at the surface of the box with the sharp, angled blade of a knife. Though it left a faint scrape mark, he could not raise any shavings, even from the corners.

“This would rather shatter than peel,” the workman remarked.

Next he took the hacksaw to it. It made a small groove after much hard sawing, but the teeth skated instead of digging in. It was a very brittle, hard material, which Elisha vowed again that he had never seen nor heard of before. He did not wish to use the cold chisel on it, for fear that it would puncture through and strike what was within, or simply fragment the whole cube into small pieces.

“Time for the crystal torch,” he decided, “though we must tread carefully. I don’t want to heat whatever is inside.”

Opening another drawer he removed an instrument that Bard had never seen before. It was a pair of small cylinders on one side, with tubes running from it to a nozzle with various controls on it, such as a pair of valves and trigger. Elisha also took out a sparker, for lighting it.

“What if you set the cube in a bowl of water while cutting one side?” Bard suggested, “it might help it stay cool.”

“‘ay, it might.” Elisha nodded at him. “Though it won’t cool whatever is directly under the surface I’m cuttin’. Still, we can try it. Fill that little pan there from the reservoir.”

The ‘reservoir’ was a small metal tank covered in the general grease and dust of the space, set up on the wall near the stove. It had a tap on one side, which squeaked as Bard turned it to fill the indicated pan with water. He set it on the workbench and Elisha put the black box inside. The water lapped only a third of the way up its edges, but Bard hoped it would serve to keep the whole thing cooler.

“Now, don’t be lookin’ directly at the flame as I cut.” Elisha cautioned, “It’s not bright like a welder, but still enough to make ye blink flame all evenin’.”

He fished a pair of darkened goggles from the drawer as he spoke, pushing them down over his bright hair onto his eyes. Then he turned the valves on the cutting instrument and lit the nozzle. It made a sandy, whooshing noise before purple flame jumped out, pale and intense. Bard tried the avoid staring directly at it, though it was difficult when he wanted to be looking at the box to see what it contained.

All this time Loran had been sitting calmly at the table. Now and then she turned her head to watch what they were doing. But much of the time she propped her chin on her knuckles, staring off into some part of space only she could see.