Jack and Calre descended beneath the earth early the next day. Jack wore spare clothing pieced together from the garb of the others, his own gear was their destination.
They had time: Grant had declared it too early to move Vasala, and after the fourth interruption by a bored Calre, he made the not-really-a-suggestion that they recover Jack’s abandoned items and ensure the extinction of the hive.
In preparation, Jack showed Calre how to make a slow burning torch from carefully woven grass, a technique taught to him by Issaiah. Calre, in turn, massaged the throat of his nimble, gentle applying pressure in a regular pattern until it produced a yellowy discharge from its mouth in a slow stream they let fall upon the grass torches. It turned clear and thick on contact with the air and soon the torches looked as if they’d been coated in a viscous resin.
The second journey through the tunnels was as unlike the first as it could be. When lit, the torches produced a white, smokeless flame that made navigating easy. The off-putting chatter of hiver clicks and frenzied movement has gone completely silent, leaving an unsettling stillness, or it would have if Calre had not taken the opportunity to produce a veritable stream of chatter. He was currently detailing the high quality of the library at his manse—the less than subtle lure did not erode its frank appeal to Jack. Calre had not spoken any more about his offer to Jack except in indirect terms, and refused further elaboration beyond gambits like these.
“Of course, my close friends are given access to the library, too few of them take me up on it. Likely for the better, I have a filing system that allows for the discrete retention of a few officially censured texts. Perhaps you’d find them of interest?”
Jack thought he’d kept his face disciplined but after that many of Calre’s implicitly offered perks dwelt on the scholastic.
“...and a copy of Lazlo’s ‘Compendium of the Titanic Works’, first edition, before the geographic context was removed to curtail foolhardy treasure seekers.”
Jack was unable to restrain the look of bookish avarice that ran across his face then, an impulse all the more discreet as Calre was behind him at the time.
“Ah, does that strike your fancy? An excerpt perhaps,” Calre affected a solemn, pretentious tone, “The fourth Work is found within the Firmal mountain range, embedded deep within an otherwise unnoteworthy peak. Dubbed ‘The Cracked Egg’ by lesser men, is in truth a spheroid, holding a curvature far from that required to be considered a member of the ovoid. It stands over a thousand meters from base to top, and nine hundred across its equator. Thus it is clear that my own, more accurate nomenclature of ‘Lazlo’s Fallen Moon’ remains a superior referential.”
“I remember my first reading of Lazlo. Opening the tome, thrilled to learn of the great artifacts of bygone ages, only for the candle of boyish excitement to be blown out by the windbag and his petulant ego,” Calre continued in a normal tone.
“Spends so much time quibbling with his rivals to make up for the lack of detail he can bring to bear,” Jack said..
“Right! Exactly! His whole reputation is based on a long distance subterranean mapping card, but he can only sense the largest objects around! And they’re all impossible to access. There’s probably ruins everywhere, sitting within rock without a path to them—invisible to him, of course.”
“Sufficient excavation could likely find ruins everywhere, but the difficulty is too great. No one bothers but hivers.”
A silence followed those words, as two minds struck an understanding so swiftly and aligned that a single look carried all that was needed.
They ran to the deeper tunnels, chased by the echos of their laughter.
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Calre swore that no matter how far they descended he could bring them unerringly back along the same route so, warded against the possibility of losing themselves, they descended with abandon. Through the primary tunnels, dotted with an occasional dead hiver slumped in a corridor, already cooling as life vacated the space. Onward to the labyrinthine stone quarrying of the hivers. The smooth walls became rough, the air stale.
Jack didn’t really expect to find anything. It was not so easy as their play had suggested to stumble across a ruin of any size, but the act of fancy, of whimsical discovery, felt like an authentic recapture of the games he’d played as a boy, and did more to endear him to Calre than all the beguiling until then.
“Tell me again why you undressed down to your small clothes? If it’s going to be a regular occurrence I would like to be forewarned.”
Jack sighed.
“I thought clothing would have marked me an outsider to their touch, I needed to resemble them as much as I feasibly could.”
“Do you often find yourself fitting in better while nude?”
Jack turned to express his consternation when something else entirely caught his attention. There, at the dim periphery of their flickering light, an edged corner of worked black stone erupted from the wall, like a brick that had been nearly submerged in mud.
Calre followed his gaze and froze infinitesimally before advancing.
“Not impossible. Improbable, far beyond improbable. Exceedingly unlikely,” Calre muttered under his breath.
The black outcropping now sat fully in the light, and its unnatural qualities revealed themselves. The glow of the torch diffused strangely across its surface, not quite reflecting, but instead gathering into bizarre patterns that flowed into new shapes. Then it would crystallize into a spiderweb of light, locking a pattern for a moment before once again becoming mutable.
They stared, enraptured by the display. At first Jack thought the entire sequence was random, but as he looked, repeating patterns became evident to him, and he said as such to Calre.
But before the noble could offer a reply, the stone returned to pure darkness. On its surface appeared reflections of themselves; their own shocked faces staring back at them.
After a moment of stillness that, if one were to attribute such things to a wall of rock, seemed almost contemplative, the stone fractured. Along the exposed surface an uncountable array of hairline cracks appeared, and then began to move. The newly formed shards moved in an intricate dance, sliding and rotating out of their positions like a mass of black beetles. In the centre of the activity appeared a gap, small at first but rapidly growing until it was so large that a person could feasibly squeeze through. A slide, descending into darkness.
“Don’t tell Grant,” Calre said.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
“...About what?”
“About this,” and Calre jumped into the opening with a whoop of excitement.
Jack, after a moment’s hesitation, followed after.
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The journey was short, a mere dozen meters curving downward until Jack found himself suddenly expulsed into a lit chamber.
Calre stood nearby the slide, a structure obviously constructed for the specific purpose of providing them access. It extended as a black tentacle into the chamber, the exterior a bumpy array of cubic stones arranged with such precision that the interior had allowed their smooth descent.
All around them was the strange black stone. Seamless and smooth, it was impossible to discern the innumerable shards that truly comprised it. Under their feet the smooth stone textured itself, providing traction on what was otherwise a sleekly smooth interior.
At the center of the chamber stood a pillar of water, as if a waterfall had been trapped in time. Small eddies and distortions rippled through it, casting rainbow patterns across its otherwise pristine surface. Soft silver light emanated from it, the sole source of illumination beyond their torches.
"What is this?" Jack barely realized he spoke until Calre answered.
"A remnant of a lost age. Hardier than the peoples who crafted it; hardier than all that came after. Lingering long enough to be lost, forgotten, and found a dozen times. Waiting millennia between visitors."
"It's not of the Shapers at all, is it?"
Calre laughed, "There are a dozen fallen civilizations at least between this and them. A dozen peoples who each left a legacy according to their nature and that of their cards."
Jack walked slowly towards the center, thinking of what Calre said.
"How could anyone fall who could make this?"
Calre was silent and a glance showed him staring absently into space. Jack continued until he stood before the silver waterfall, and was surprised when Calre finally spoke with quiet and agonizing sincerity.
"It becomes an inevitability. The Shapers rebuilt the world to their whim, but those same powers led them to conflicts their society could not bear. The cards they depended on were lost, and so all that is left is the legacy of the Shaped. Nimbles. Amblers. Umbrars. The cycle will turn again in time, perhaps a few more wonders will come, but certainly more monsters. The deaths of empires are not gentle."
Jack thought of all he had seen. The cruelty of the umbrar, its joy only in suffering. The hivers, spun from the essence of humans into something monstrous. Cards had been what made them, the thought sat uneasily with him as he stared into the column before him.
But he'd seen otherwise as well. The Calamut Springworks had brought innovation that drew thousands out of misery, enabling the reforms that uplifted the dreg-caste, that gave a life to Gravel—Harmon Found, his very name revealing his base birth. It had only been possible thanks to cards. He almost spoke up then but something changed in the water before him.
Within the column appeared a figure, more than a reflection, it showed Jack static and impassive, as if a sculpture of perfect likeness had been laid within the water.
After a moment the clothing dissolved away, a soft blurring maintaining only the very limit of modesty.
There he stood, emblazoned in the cuts and bruises of misadventure, Jack felt vulnerable seeing himself so displayed, so casually known.
A bit of the figure’s nose disappeared, unnoticeable at first, just the tip. Then, as if an invisible butcher of prodigious skill worked, a further section disappeared. Layer after layer of flesh, revealing by stages the internals of his body in grotesque detail.
The chambers of his heart pulsed, the tissue of the lungs stretched with every inhale, perfectly in time with his own. The sectioning continued, eventually revealing only a few scraps of disconnected flesh that were soon gone.
A beat passed, then came the skeleton. Bare of any scrap of flesh it stood complete and articulated. A red aura hovered around assorted locations, concentrated particularly on an arm and along the ribs to one side—his lingering injuries.
It shifted then, moving through visualizations of the various systems of his body, the visceral organs, musculature, nerves, and veins—which had a curious blue haze surrounding them.
Jack and Calre had watched in silence, both of them entirely transfixed by the sequence before them.
A new stage had been reached as within the column black motes were aggregating on the surface facing Jack. Arising seemingly from nothing they pressed against the surface, and then began to emerge. Five individual points of black extending forth as the liquid behind became a frenzy of activity as more and more particles rushed to build the tendrils reaching for him.
Jack took a step back, but his motion seemed to elicit no reaction. The extrusion continued, the five merging into a single flat structure that in a sickening twist of perception was suddenly recognizable as a palm. It continued to flow out: an entire arm, flexing spasmodically as if testing itself within the world. But before it reached the shoulder, a dull thump resounded through the chamber as it fell suddenly from the column to the ground. From its surface flowed black fluid, revealing pink flesh beneath, a perfect replica of Jack's arm.
"It must be impressed," Calre said solemnly.
"What?" Jack answered, his attention still fixated on the disembodied limb that rested on the floor before them.
"It gave you a hand."
A beat passed. It started as a low chuckle, but soon both of them were in hysterics, tears streaming as they hunched over in breathless guffaws. In between breaths they struggled to speak, sending each other back into fits.
"Don't ask it to lend you an ear,"
"Or keep an eye on ya,"
Eventually they settled, finding relief from the intensity of their experience in the sudden defusing of tension. They could only speculate what the intention of the room was, some kind of diagnostic or healing process, though what use Jack might have with a disembodied limb baffled the pair of them.
"Much of the lingering artifacts are like this. Reliant on cards that no longer exist in any living person. Perhaps it expects us to remove your injured arm like a piece of ripped clothing, having found a suitable replacement. Perhaps we misused it entirely and it was used to recreate fine cuts of meat."
Without any recourse, Jack collected ‘his’ arm and pushed it back into the column.
“Thank you, but uh, I don’t have a way to use this.”
The arm was accepted readily, floating for a moment in the column before dissolving away.
Struck by a moment of inspiration Jack acted on impulse before better sense held him back.
“C-could we take a piece of you?” Jack poured out his water skin and gestured to it hesitantly, “Healers could use the inner sight you provide to care for patients far from here.”
Stillness, of a kind the pillar hadn’t expressed, all its eddies and flows frozen. Then sudden activity.
Motion again dominated the pillar, a frenzy greater than any they had seen before. Liquid flowing in great eddies towards a single point from which a globe formed like a droplet of dew.
Acting on impulse, Jack reached out and caught it just as it fell. A bulb of liquid crystal, through it he could see the bones and flesh of the hand holding it.
When he brought it to his waterskin it bulged towards it like an amoeba, flowing itself in through the narrow opening until the skin bulged from within.
Calre looked at him with something like awe.
“What possibly possessed you to think of that?”
Jack considered how to answer, debating what it had truly been that motivated him in that moment.
“It seemed friendly. And when you joked, I thought I saw it ripple, like it was laughing.”
Calre merely shook his head, and soon they left the same way they came, a tendril of stone extending down from the ceiling to lift them up and away.