Ptahmohtep watched the other two walk away and shuddered, knowing he was about to lose his mind. He had a feeling that Pax knew it, too, and that the conniving AI fuck wanted to be as far away as possible. Pax had been in his head—he had seen the things Ptah had gone through just to survive, the ragged hope he’d maintained throughout his seven hundred years of imprisonment, keeping his sanity through it all simply by clinging onto the idea he would someday outlast the Pharaoh and be free, only have it shattered by a desperate AI and the ignorant wastelander it was using as its patsy. Ptahmohtep had placed so much hope on escaping, on winning his freedom, that he knew that losing it again would break him. Desperate, dying, he struggled against the bindings he could feel tightening on his mind, cinching down his essence much in the same way the Jackals’ staffs had torn him into solid reality.
Hours passed, and what was left of his body shuddered as he tried to hold himself together. Pax had said it was useless to fight, that there was no other way, that he had to accept the terms of the treaty, but he would rather die in a pit of fire than bow his head to anyone, ever again.
Yet he was losing more of himself, watching it float away with every piece of his physical essence that disintegrated, knowing that he was about to lose what little freedom he’d gained from his escape. Forever, because it was impossible to complete the terms of the treaty arrangement. Already, the bands from the cragnanny’s interface called to him, dragging at him, leaving him feeling desperate to rejoin her, to obey her…
His will, however, screamed against that, thrashing like a wild thing. He’d spent seven hundred years fighting that fate, and he wasn’t about to let it happen to him now.
“If you’re listening to me,” Ptahmohtep said to the darkness, his breath like a sparkling black cloud against the starry sky, “I need your help.”
He had felt something out in the darkness, watching him for the last two hours. He hoped it was the same thing that had come to him at the base of the ledge, offering him a look of revulsion in its bright yellow eyes.
“I was kidnapped as a baby,” Ptahmohtep told the cold black sky. “I don’t remember much, just that my mom glowed. Ethereal, like she wasn’t even a part of this world. They put me in a sack, carried me back to New Cairo. They put the collar on me to lock me in a shape they could control.”
The darkness didn’t respond.
Sighing out a puff of starry blackness, Ptahmohtep said, “I’m seven hundred years old and I haven’t run into anyone yet who hasn’t wanted to use me for their own gain except once, three days ago, who looked at me like I was a monster. Even that cragnanny wants me to conjure up some water for her.” He chuckled desperately. “Not that horrible a request in the grand scheme of things, I guess, but I’d like to just be normal for once.”
The night answered him with silence.
“If there’s any way you can stop this, please do it,” Ptahmohtep whispered. “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose any of it. All I wanted, this whole time, was to be free of the Pharaoh and go back home.” His breath caught again as he considered that. “But I’m not even sure I have a home to go back to. I stopped feeling my mother a long time ago.”
There was a long pause as he listened to the sounds of night, his breath unsteady in the darkness. For a long moment, he thought that his visitor would stay hidden, but then he felt something move in the wash, the soft sound of footsteps against sand.
When the being came into view beside him, it was more a vague sense of movement than an actual physical presence. Ptahmohtep tried to turn, but his body was only half-there and it no longer had any physical anchorage. Nonetheless, when his attention shifted, despite no retinas, no ocular muscles or lenses to focus, he could see.
…and he froze, seeing the fury in her face.
She stood like a starry black cloud over him, a vaguely-human shape that shifted between man and dog and rat and bird… Only the fury remained stationary, the look of complete violence.
She owns this place, he thought. I’m on her land…
“I’m sorry,” Ptahmohtep babbled. “I didn’t mean to intrude…”
The living shadow bared fanged teeth. Then it reached out and grabbed the blue strands wrapping his body and ripped.
Ptahmohtep screamed, feeling the last of his world crumble apart.
#
Skipper decided to give the Skymancer an extra day to get his shit together, as Pax had advised her. She’d wrapped her forehead in a strip of black cloth from one of the dead Ibis to hide the glowing stone between her brows, but its presence continued to bother her, almost like she had a target painted on her head. What was worse, it felt…different…now. After that ten minute screaming episode, the bands had gone limp, almost as if the thing that they attached to had ceased to exist, and now they just hung there, at the edge of her periphery, like she was constantly dragging around a clump of ethereal ropes with her mind.
“Are you sure it’s working right?” Skipper asked, interrupting yet another dissertation on botany that she had long ago stopped listening to.
Pax blinked. “The Lindheimer’s morning glories?”
“No,” Skipper said. She reached up and waved her hands in front of the crystal, but her hands passed right through the tendrils stretching from her mind. “The interface thingie. I think it went dead.”
“You’re still seeing me, so it’s not dead,” Pax said.
“I haven’t felt him since he started screaming,” Skipper insisted. “Could he have died?”
Pax winced, looking like he didn’t want to answer. Then, sighing, he wrapped his big hands around his knee and said, “Okay, so I didn’t want to make the two of you nervous back in the cavern, but there was a possibility—quite large, actually—that Ptah wasn’t going to survive the interface. Usually, candidates are chosen from a group of qualified individuals, ones who have been screened for mental health. Ptahmohtep…didn’t meet a lot of those qualifications. He never would have been chosen as a representative. I won’t go into the details, but he’s got too much…baggage, let’s say.”
Skipper peered at the blond man ‘sitting’ on the rock. She knew he wasn’t actually there—she had walked through him twice, now—but it helped to have someone to focus her eyes on. “So you think you drove him insane?”
“I didn’t do it. His own inherent mental flaws did it.” Pax made a regretful gesture. “An unfortunate side-effect of the disintegration of civilization on this planet.”
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Skipper didn’t like the idea of an insane god wandering around in her canyon. “So what’s going to happen to him?”
Pax shrugged. “If he can’t make the interface, he’ll probably lose control completely and his energy will probably just dissolve back into the whole, to be scavenged by any other Tuliin who happen to be in the area.”
“So, what, he went into shock and just keeled over?” She felt more than a little irritated at that. She’d actually been looking forward to helping the Skymancer get north, and having him just…dissipate…frustrated her. Then something else occurred to her. “You don’t sound too upset about that idea.”
“I didn’t need him, technically. Just you.”
Skipper narrowed her eyes at him. “Need me for what?”
Pax shrugged, gesturing at the sky. “I’m going to save this place.”
Skipper glanced up at the sky, confused. “What place?”
“Earth. We fucked it up—and I’ll admit, I had more than my share of responsibility for that, considering, so I’m going to fix it.”
Skipper glanced at Pax, who had spent most of the last day talking about plants and animals, not about saving the world. “Save it from what?”
“Another catastrophe,” Pax said. “Someone got some old tech up and working again. Ships, weapons…the same stuff that destroyed the planet the first time. And I can feel at least one full symbiote interface out there, but it’s strange, almost as if there are several in one place.” He seemed to shake himself. “Anyway, we came like one micrometer, statistically speaking, from a complete planetary extinction the last time everything went to shit and we triggered that Yellowstone eruption. It should have gone off completely, a planetary extinction event a la the meteor that took out the dinosaurs, and everything on this planet should be dead, but by some grace of the gods that I still don’t understand, that didn’t happen.” He held up his hand, pinching the air between his fingers. “We were this close to losing all life as we know it and me being stranded in an underground prison no one would ever find. Yellowstone only blew a little, just a burp, and it still left the continent ripped in half.” Pax lowered his hand, his blue eyes eerily intense. “I’ve spent the last hundred years in my hole, recognizing all the same signs of it happening again, except this time, there’s a group of fools out there who want the damned thing to go off.”
Skipper didn’t know what Yellowstone was, but she recognized the volcano cult Ptah had told her about. “So you want to stop another war?” She didn’t fully understand. “There’s no one to fight a war like last time. Everyone’s dead.”
“In this case, I wish that were true, but no.” Pax shook his head. “I can feel them out there. They’ve got ships, weaponry. I don’t have full access due to the…restrictions…that were placed on me, but I can get a gist. Someone to the East is rebuilding using Tuliin technology, and as far as I can tell, they’re not Tuliin themselves. That both hobbles them from using the tech as it’s meant to be used…while at the same time makes it extremely efficient as weaponry.”
Skipper considered that. “So…you want to stop a war.”
“No,” Pax said, with a sudden vehemence that startled her. “I want to stop these two idiot children from completely destroying themselves in another petty bickering match.” He gestured at the sky again, then at the cliff faces flickering in their campfire. “This is all that’s left. For both of them. This planet. Earth. They lost the star drives when humans repurposed them for bombs. We’re stuck here. That means your kind and his kind need to get along, or everyone—literally everyone—is going to die.” He sighed, the vehemence apparently exhausting him as he slumped over his knee, looking tired. I don’t know what stopped Yellowstone from a full eruption last time, but I know it won’t happen again. This is literally my last chance to save everything I fucked up.”
Skipper squinted at him. “How did you fuck it up?”
But he waved her off. “The short of it is I hope your Skymancer friend is still alive, but if he isn’t, we can find another pureblood. I can feel a group of them to the north, plus there’s one nearby that I haven’t quite managed to pinpoint yet. Almost as if this whole area is infused with it. I’ll figure it out eventually, though, and we’ll make contact and I’ll tell it my plan.”
“The whole…area?” Skipper frowned. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen another Tuliin.”
Pax snorted as if that were impossible. “It’s here. Probably one of the ones who took the terraforming contract, bound themselves to the land to keep it from going to complete shit in the cataclysm.”
Skipper wasn’t sure what terraforming was, but she shook her head anyway. “There aren’t any other Tuliin here. I would’ve seen them.”
“Oh yeah?” Pax laughed. “You know the river down there?” He gestured deeper into the canyon, where a line of blue trickled like a cerulean ribbon in the basin in the daylight. “Where do you think that water is coming from? It isn’t the sky, and all the glaciers were nuked as a final fuck-you to take out Hong Kong after they glassed the eastern seaboard.”
“It comes out of the ground,” Skipper said, because she knew. She’d made the mistake of going there once, and had barely survived the experience.
“The aquafers were drained,” Pax said, looking amused. “So tell me…how’s that happening?”
Skipper hesitated. She’d never considered why the river came out of the haunted glade at the top of the canyon. She just…accepted it, like all the other cragnannies she’d ever met. The legends about the place were terrifying, and more than once, she’d seen bodies floating down the river from the oasis.
“I’ll bet it’s a terraformer,” Pax said. He held up a hand. “Consider this. This canyon clearly receives more rainfall than the other areas around it. I could see the sand dunes out there once you got us up on the rim. I bet it’s one of the only pockets of life out here, isn’t it?”
Slowly, Skipper nodded, not sure what the stone was getting at. “Water makes it easier to live in the desert. Everyone knows this.”
Pax nodded. “So where’s the water coming from? Why would it rain here and not the rest of the land around it? Where’s the river coming from?”
Skipper thought back to the haunted oasis. “There’s a cave at the start of the canyon. It comes from there.”
Pax’s blue eyes sharpened. “Can you get us there?”
She recoiled immediately. “People who go to that place die.”
“Why?” Pax asked immediately, suddenly intense. “What’s killing them?”
“An evil spirit,” Skipper said. “It’s been there since my grandparents were kids. They told me stories about it killing an entire team of Changers who tried to stay there for the night. Gutted them and threw their bodies in the river.”
But Pax was grinning like she’d told him it was inhabited by a colony of very fat, very slow rabbits that like to hold still as you threw stones at them. “You need to take me there.”
She wasn’t taking him there, and she told him that. “I’d rather go kill the Pharaoh.”
“You’re not killing the Pharaoh without a Tuliin backing you, and it sounds to me like Ptahmohtep is down for the count. Get me to the source of that river and I can bargain for some big guns.”
Skipper squinted at Pax. “You really think Ptahmohtep is dead?”
“As bright as the young man was, he wasn’t trained to use an interface, and he wasn’t a willing participant to begin with, so it was unlikely he fared well. I didn’t want you to have to witness his disintegration.” Pax’s face went serious. “Tug on one of the interface strands. Tell me what happens.”
With great effort, Skipper isolated one of the glowing blue threads and gave it a tug. It all came back to her, the end cut and jagged like it had been hacked away.
“It’s just limp,” Skipper said. “Nothing on it.”
“Yeah, he’s dead,” Pax said. “Which way is the source of the river?” He got up like he planned to leave right then. Seeing she wasn’t going to go with him, he insisted, “We need to hurry, Skipper. I can feel it building out there, the upcoming deaths, the genetic purges. Like a storm. Just like last time.” He sounded like a man half-mad with visions of the future, and not for the first time, Skipper got the unnerving image of those insane men wandering the desert, screaming of the future, fools who had dared to put their fingers to one of the forbidden stones.
“First we’re going to check on Ptah,” Skipper said, irritated with how willing the stone was to discard one Skymancer for a new one.
Pax made a face. “Ptah is untrained, and the young man clearly has no sense of responsibility for his species, or duty to uphold the peace of the planet.” He gestured up the canyon. “We need to find someone who does, and we need to do it fast, or these idiots will trigger that volcano, and all life on this planet will perish. That presence to the East is building—they’re finding and firing up more ships. Like an ant colony someone kicked up with a rototiller.”
“What’s a—” Skipper began, then she quickly held up a hand to cut him off before he could launch into another diatribe about air temperatures she didn’t care about. “Never mind.” Too many things the stone said didn’t make sense, and if she tried to get him to explain them all, she’d be there for eternity. “I want to see what happened to Ptah in the morning. Afterwards, we can talk about going up the canyon.”
Pax glanced again to the east, almost wary. “Just don’t take too long. I’ve gotten a sense of these things over the years, and whatever’s about to happen, it’s going to look like a tomato carved into spaghetti by a ditching pick.”