Halo: Primordium (12 page)

BY TREMENDOUS FORCE
of wil, Vinnevra ignored her compulsion and led us away from the chasm, back through the low dry hils and boulders to flat terrain—the direct opposite of where her
geas
was teling her to go. Gamelpar and I folowed, walking in as straight a line as we could manage toward haphazard foothils like wrinkles in a blanket. Looking up along the low portion of the curve, I saw the

foothils push against a sharp range of rocky mountains, al fading into the atmospheric haze about where the great body of water would be. Beyond the haze lay smooth Halo foundation lacking any artificial landscape, climbing for thousands of kilometers until it met a cloud-dotted line drawn perpendicular between the edge wals.

Beyond that line, the Halo’s false landscape appeared again, deep green and rich, tantalizing.

The wisdom of simply reversing course did not seem obvious to me, but Gamelpar did not object—and I could think of no reason not to put as much distance as possible between us and the Captive. The girl looked haunted.

Her
geas,
it seems, is not fixed. The Librarian seems to have
programmed this wheel with the means to direct and protect
her subjects. But who controls the beacons now?

I had no answer for the old spirit’s obvious question.

Within a couple of hours, we were walking over irregular sheets of gray, flaky crust, overlaid with a powdery white char that tasted bitter on my tongue—bitter, burnt, nasty. What passed for natural landscape overlying the layer of bedrock, itself little more than a veneer, had been burned away, as if the Gods had decided to drop sheets of fire and destroy anything living.

Hundreds of meters ahead, blocking our path decisively, jagged sheets of blue-gray foundation material had peeled back, pushing aside the white char and crust and exposing a great gaping wound in the Halo itself.

Ruin laid over ruin.

We walked around the towering, curling, jagged edges of that hole, pausing once only to peer into a pit at least four or five kilometers across. None of us could speak, looking down through layer after penetrated layer of smashed, ruptured architecture and melted machinery—down many hundreds of meters, to be plugged at the bottom by shapeless black slag.

And yet—for the Halo, this was but a minor wound, not nearly as large as the great black smear we had seen high up on the sky bridge. Replacing our region of the wheel, our tile, was apparently not necessary. Not yet, at any rate.

The Lord of Admirals had no comment on this destruction, but I could feel a growing impatience and restlessness, his brooding, measuring inteligence gathering strength, waiting for the proper moment to make a difference. I did not know whether to be frightened of him. So many other fears loomed larger.

After a few hours, we climbed a rough scarp to reach a higher, relatively undisturbed stretch of level land—dirt, rocks, a ridge of granite populated by a few singed and drooping trees—and a smal pond left over from the recent deluge. We paused. Gamelpar dipped his fingers into the pond and tasted the water, then nodded.

Drinkable, he declared. But of animals, berries, any kind of food—

nothing.

Again the shadow of night rushed down and we lay in the chil, shivering, half-starved. Gamelpar never once complained of cold or hunger. Vinnevra had said nothing for many hours.

Morning came, and listlessly we rose and washed ourselves.

Then Vinnevra closed her eyes, turned slowly, hand out—and stopped. Her hand pointed back to the chasm. With a convulsive shudder, she swung halfway around—reversing the direction her
geas
told her we should take.

When she looked at me, her eyes were bleak.

Her strength was impressive. Against al my instincts, I found myself admiring, then growing fond of this pair. Foolishness—it was Riser I needed to find, and once I found him, wouldn’t we celebrate by shaking our feet and leaving al others behind?

I wondered now, however, whether I could guess what Riser would do. He had always surprised me.

We traveled onward, inland and west, through the roling foothils toward the more sharply defined range. This path took us by the end of the day to the edge of what might have once been another city—a strange, shifting ruin, over which the ghosts of monuments flickered, as if struggling to return.

Vinnevra stood for a while on the broken boundary of a rounded, slagged causeway—raising her hands as if imploring, begging for relief or at least some sort of explanation.

“I need to go back!” she said to us. “Keep me, hold me! Stop me!”

Gamelpar and I gently held her arms and we al sat down as a sour wind blew through the rubble, moaning over holows and whispering through shattered arches.

Just a few hundred paces over the waste, to the left of the causeway, lay half of a ship larger than the Didact’s star boat—

many hundreds of paces long, its rounded hul blackened and slumped. This boat’s spacefaring days were over. It seemed to have been attacked and brought down through the Halo’s atmosphere, to smash into this section of the great hoop.

These were not fresh ruins, and this place had never been a human city. Again, here was grim evidence that decades ago, Forerunners had fought Forerunners, and many had died.

The Lord of Admirals now decided to rise up and gloat.

Confusion to the enemy! Those who tyrannize humans have
fought among themselves. Dissension in their ranks! Why
should that not bring us joy?

The old spirit seemed to take control of my feet and legs, and for the moment, without making a conscious choice, I ceded my eyes and body to him. Beyond any plan, any stretch of my own experience, we stroled along the causeway, leaving Gamelpar and Vinnevra behind for the moment, feeling disappointment, sorrow, vindication—just as I had felt at the first awakening of horror and pride back on Charum Hakkor.

The causeway ascended at a gentle angle, and we walked up the slope, leaping away as the edges of jagged cracks squirmed and sparkled with a strange light—as if trying to rejoin, to begin repairs.

But for this place, the wil, the energy, the resources no longer existed. The command structure had long since been broken. That much seemed obvious—though I could not even begin to understand the underlying technology.

Again, I felt like bowing down and worshipping.

They are not gods,
the old spirit reminded me with an air of disdain. But the ruins were too sad, and he no longer expressed any sense of triumph.

They are like us, in the great scheme of things, sometimes
strong, too often foolish and weak, caught up in politics . . .

and now at war. But why?

The Lord of Admirals walked me to the end of the causeway, and we looked out over the dead ship and the shattered, exploded skeletons of buildings that once had risen thousands of meters into the sky, but now lay across each other like so many dead on a field of battle—toppled, half-melted, yet neither entirely stil nor silent.

I was distracted by the reappearance of wals and framework beams rising from the ruins perhaps five hundred meters away—

rising and reassembling, much as the Didact’s ship had built itself at the center of Djamonkin Crater. It seemed for a moment that it might succeed—took on almost a finished aspect—but that was an ilusion.

The wals disappeared, the skeletal framework flickered, dropped away . . .

Vanished.

In mere seconds, the effort came to an end with a sigh and rush of wind, and the building’s ghost was no more. Then—to the right of the causeway—another futile effort, another resurrection—

another colapse and rush of wind.

The city was like a buffalo brought down by a pride of great cats, its flanks torn and throat slashed, bleeding out as the predators wait, tongues loling, for its sharp black horns to cease swinging. . . . The buffalo struggles to regain its feet, but the hyenas scream and laugh, and the pride leader growls her hungry triumph.

I was being drawn into the old spirit’s memories of the destruction of Charum Hakkor, the colapse of entire fleets of human ships. . . . The pain and sense of loss staggered me. The old presence, this spirit, this ancient
thing
within me, was as much a ghost as the ruins writhing and moaning al around.

Finaly, neither the Lord of Admirals nor I could bear to watch. I could feel neither his words nor his emotions. He, too, had colapsed, retreated.

“No more!”
I shouted, and covered my eyes, then stumbled back to the margins.

The girl looked to me as if for some explanation.

“We shouldn’t cross this place,” I said. “A bad, sad place. It doesn’t know it’s dead.”

WE DECIDED ON
a course around the ruins.

Another day of travel and Gamelpar’s strength seemed to be flagging. We rested more hours than we traveled, but finaly found a shalow rivulet of water and edible weeds—or so Gamelpar assured us. They were less obnoxious than the greasy berries, and with thirst quenched and stomach less empty, the old man seemed to revive.

He waved his hand, then moved away on his stick.

Ahead the hils resumed. Here they were covered with dry grass and spotted with trees I wasn’t familiar with, pleasantly shaped, of middle height, with black bark and gray-green leaves that splayed out like the fingers of cupped hands.

The sky was free of clouds, except far up the bridge, at the point where the bridge was as broad as my outstretched palm. I squinted and moved my hand, covering and uncovering the clouds, while Gamelpar watched without much interest. Beyond the sharp mountains we could now see the body of water very clearly. The shadows had grown long, the air was cooling, the sun was three fingers above the gray wal. Darkness was coming.

We rested.

In the shade of a black-trunked tree, I pried a stone out of caked dirt and looked it over, marveling at its simplicity. Simple—and false. Everything here had been manufactured by Forerunners. Or perhaps it had al been stripped away from a planet, transported here, and rearranged. Either way, this land and the ring itself was like the toy of a great, spoiled child that can have anything it wants,
make
anything it wants.

Yet humans had nearly defeated their fleets, ten thousand years ago.

“You have that look,” Vinnevra said, kneeling beside me. “Like you’re somebody else.”

“I am, sometimes,” I said.

She gazed through the deep twilight at where Gamelpar had rested with his back against the smooth trunk of a tree. “So is he.” She scratched idly at the dirt. “No good here for insects.” I hefted the stone. “I could learn to throw rocks at birds.” We both smiled.

“But we’d starve before I got any good,” I admitted.

Gamelpar was much tougher than either of us thought. He kept up with us beyond the foothils and into the mountains.

I lost count of the days.