Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams (52 page)

“We’re going to
wreck the house?” Stephanie shrieked, half excited, half petrified
by the thought of the house collapsing on them.

“We’re not
directly under the house. This passage curves back on itself.”
Stanwick spoke close to Stephanie’s ear.

So much dust
and debris fell on the two riders as Dannum’s giant claws scraped
at the stone, carving long furrows as they went. Stephanie coughed,
squeezing her eyes tightly shut, “I can’t breathe.”

“Don’t then.”
Stanwick yelled, “Let the delvers do their work. Just close your
mouth.”

She tried. She
closed her mouth and hummed, so desperate to burst into song now
that she had the tune to
little people
in her head. Even
knowing that she should be able to go without breathing, she
couldn’t convince herself, so she wrapped the glardium tight around
her face. She could see enough through the cloth, the tunnel above
swaying wildly as she was jostled and jolted by the motion of
Dannum’s muscles. The beast turned, clinging easily to the roof of
the cave as it transitioned towards a flat passage. Stephanie
slipped, her hands thrashing wildly for a finger hold as her body
dangled. She managed to grasp hold of Stanwick’s neck, clinging
tightly, pressing her cloth covered face against the back of
Stanwick’s head.

Dannum
corkscrewed about the tunnel until he was upright, barreling with
great speed now. Stephanie swung wildly out to the side, her arms
stronger than she had realized. She adjusted her grip, but her
fingers somehow found their way to Stanwick’s mouth. She couldn’t
let go, so she held on fast, one hand at Stanwick’s neck, the other
with her fingers hooked over Stanwick’s bottom teeth. She could
hear Stanwick’s laughter over her own scream, then finally her body
smacked down onto the surface of Dannum’s back.

When the beast
finally came to rest, Stephanie rested her head on Stanwick’s back
and let out an exhausted whimper.

“I’m
sorry.”

Stanwick
released her grip and turned to face the child, “What are you sorry
for?”

Stephanie
laughed and wiped her fingers on the glardium, “I had my fingers in
your mouth.”

“Oh that.”
Stanwick raised her eyebrows, “You couldn’t help it. He’s
fast.”

Stephanie
nodded, “He’s scary. I’m glad he’s on our side.”

Stanwick
pointed down the length of his body, “See his wings?”

Gasping,
Stephanie leaned over and craned her neck.

“I don’t see
them”

Stanwick
shuffled closer to Stephanie, leaning their heads together and
pointing at the long flap of leathery hide, “He can’t really fly
with them, but when you see him with his wings spread wide, that’s
scary.”

West had been a little
surprised when he’d heard Stanwick use the word barracks. The
thought of Stanwick stocking up with armaments and ammo was
ludicrous. When he had opened the door to the next room, her words
had started to make sense. The space read more like a more bizarre
wing of a natural history museum. They were greeted by the sight of
two long lines of skeletal animals, their bones pieced together in
odd assemblages. He walked over to the nearest, stroking the tiger
skull, his fingertips dipping over the curve of the frontal lobe,
into the orbit. The skull sat atop the skeletal torso of a great
ape, but the bones of the ape’s arms terminated in long hooked
claws.

“Tasteful.”
Charlene commented, a little appalled by what she saw.

“They’re not
real.” West replied, “They’re casts.”

Walking towards
a strange human-deer hybrid, David’s face screwed up in confusion
“What’s the point?”

“Think of them
as muses.” West suggested. He looked around, searching for the
cooler cabinets he knew must be there somewhere. ‘Hithnatan eth
durro’ he thought - muses and meat. In the great battlefields of
the Mythologue, that was how barracks were stocked. He caught sight
of them between the tree trunk bones of a mammoth; the side walls
of the room lined with walk-in coolers.

Cobb stalked
off further into the room, his eyes drawn to a large feline body
which had been merged with a bull’s skull, “Stanwick makes
these?”

West pulled
open one of the cooler’s, “I don’t know. Probably. It’s a lost
art.”

Cobb laughed,
“Some things are meant to be lost.” He ran his hands over the
bull’s horns, “So muses for what?”

Charlene
remembered her first morning with the leeches. The fitness
instructor, the bathroom mirror and all of the changes she had
undergone. She stared at the tiger skull which West had touched.
She had seen at least some small part of a battle of the Mythologue
on the hopper. She moved closer, leaning in so that she could
examine the teeth and the elongated jaw. Even the size of the skull
didn’t seem like it would be too much of a challenge. No, she
understood what West meant. The delvers understood. She pushed her
jaw forward, feeling her lower canine teeth pressing into the flesh
of her upper lip.

West returned
to the center of the room, heaving a large carcass in his wake. He
dropped it on the floor in between the two rows of skeletal
abominations, “You know that fennec fox you were talking
about?”

Cobb smiled
broadly.

“Well,” West
went on, “These muses are like your fennec fox.” He pointed towards
the mammoth skeleton, “There’s nothing in this room that is beyond
you.” He walked over to another muse, patting the thing on the
spinal column, “The only thing that stands between you in your
current form, and Cobb the bear headed antelope, is time and food.”
He shoved the carcass with the toe of his shoe, “I don’t know how
much time we have, but the pantry is full.”

David’s
nostrils flared as he looked at the meat, “I can’t eat that.”

West shrugged,
“There’s other food in there. Shelves full of bratwurst, cooked
chickens and cheeses.”

Charlene turned
to face the others and opened her mouth, holding up her hands.

David froze
rigid. Charlene’s face was wrong. He tried to articulate the
thought, but he kept coming back to the same word. Just wrong. Her
mouth was pushed forward, her teeth showing under lips spread too
thin. She had spent little thought on her nose, which was still
essentially a nose, but the cartilage of the bridge had extended
with her mouth, so her nostrils were pushed wide. That mouth
though. David couldn’t take his eyes off her teeth. He looked at
the tiger skull and realized that her teeth were sharper, coming to
dagger like points. All of them. Then he noticed her hands, or
rather, he saw that her hands had become something much more
frightening than her teeth. They weren’t remotely human, or even
vaguely feline. Two large hook like claws extended several inches
beyond where David imagined her fingers would have come to.

“Roar.” She
tried to shout the word, but it was almost impossible to properly
annunciate the rhotic consonant, so it just came out as a
protracted ‘yaw’.

West clapped
his hands together in elation,“There.” He patted Cobb’s back, “You
see now? The muses.” He looked at Charlene’s body, which had
understandably lost some of its mass. He walked over and hugged
her, her claws digging awkwardly into his back, “Now you need to
eat.”

Stephanie felt
the change in Dannum, the heat rising, the muscles of his back
flexing. He could hear them, somewhere up there. She felt his want.
She saw it; the disembodied manifestation of his desire, moving out
ahead of him with reckless abandon. But he waited, because through
the child, he could see. Patience was its own reward. He beheld as
each impulsive form bled on the unseen battlefield of an unwoven
world. Patience. When the drone strikes started above them, cracks
crazed the walls around them, the earth groaning worryingly.
Patience.

“Does time
really speed up when you get older?” Stephanie asked, because she
knew that if anyone could answer, it would be Stanwick.

Stanwick
stroked the debris out of Stephanie’s hair, “Time is whatever you
make of it.”

Surprised by
her answer, Stephanie glanced over her shoulder, “Aunt Hannah says
the same thing.”

“She must be
pretty smart then.”

Stephanie
nodded, “Super smart.”

The tunnel
shook again, rubble tumbling about Dannum’s claws far below.

“I wish Aunt
Han was here.” Stephanie admitted, knuckling her eyes as she
blinked away the dust. Before Stanwick could answer, Stephanie went
on, “I know she couldn’t be here. I mean, I haven’t seen her. I
don’t think she ever came along with us.”

Stanwick
smiled, “It’s not really safe here.”

Stephanie
rolled her eyes, “We’re fine.” She patted a scaly outcrop of
Dannum’s back, then leaned on her side, resting her head. Listening
to the rolling thunder of the drone strikes, Stephanie closed her
eyes, “Are you married?”

“Well
Stephanie, that is a complicated question.”

“Um, I don’t
think so.” Stephanie corrected her, certain that she understood at
least this much about the workings of the world.

Stanwick
thought about the many vows she had made and broken. There was no
easy way to explain it to a seven year old, so she settled for a
half truth, “I’m not married any more, no.”

Stephanie
sighed, satisfied that she was in the company of wisdom, “I don’t
think I’ll ever get married.”

For twenty minutes
their conversation meandered, punctuated by the thunderous noise of
the drone strikes above. So many important questions. Favorite
colors, books, films, princesses, food. Stanwick enjoyed answering.
It was a rare opportunity to chisel herself in stone for that one
moment in time, defined by a child’s perspective. When the bombing
pattern seemed to reach a crescendo, Stephanie sat upright and
handed the glardium weave to Stanwick, then held her arms over her
head, “It’s time.”

Stanwick
nodded, “So it is.” She wrapped the cloth about Stephanie, around
her waist twice, allowing some of the material to drop in swags
before collecting both ends of the train up and passing it up over
her shoulders. She pulled the two ends of the cloth around
Stephanie’s neck, then she pulled the rest of the material down
Stephanie’s back, tucking it through the loop she had made about
her waist.

Stephanie’s
arms fell down to her sides. She thanked Stanwick, and hugged her,
then the two of them crouched low, holding tight onto whatever
handholds they could find in Dannum’s tough skin.

Dannum reared
up, clawing at the rock overhead. There wasn’t far to climb. He
bored a hole all about him, careful of his precious cargo. He would
guard the child, and her dream. Up through soil, pushing forward
now, towards the sounds of the engines and footsteps. Up through
the ruins of the house, scooping aside tons of masonry with each
claw.

Leveling off,
he raised up on his rear haunches, waiting, because Dannum had
seen. This was supposed to be Tiernan’s moment. This was the start
of Tiernan’s great war against humanity, and out off the ashes, the
birth of a true religion for the masses. Worship him and be spared.
Tiernan had given them all a spectacle to behold; a resurrection
for the modern age. Well, Dannum could hardly blame him for that.
He had learned from the best. Born of Allim, raised on the book of
Antrusca, Tiernan had grown up with that image of resurrection, but
sure, hadn’t everyone? Even Dannum had grown up with a belief in
the rebirth of the Lonorren, the architect of continents, and
before Lonorren there was Yuntannan, and on and on. These people
were no different. Resurrection was nothing new to them.

Time to give
them something new.

Stephanie watched,
detached from the reality which lay before her, because it was only
a fragment of what there was to see. She felt Dannum’s
consciousness, his bristling awareness of this new world. She felt
the ground beneath him and the cool of the soil as his claws dug
their colossal trenches. He heard something overhead, but Stephanie
looked up to the sky and saw nothing. In that moment, there was
such a surge of malevolent joy from Dannum. Malevolence wasn’t an
emotion that Stephanie was familiar with. It rose in her, warm and
absorbing, and in an attempt to expunge that new feeling from her
range of emotion, she thought about Hannah, and she smiled.

Get up.

Dannum heard
her command, but still he waited.

On Toan’s order, the
battalion broke off into platoons of thirty, men and women marching
in tight regimented groups. He was front and center and proud of
it. He didn’t believe in leading from the rear. If he moved, his
soldiers would follow. If he died, there were another forty men and
women who had fought on the fields of the Mythologue and each of
them were more than ready to step up. Dying didn’t seem likely. The
estate was thoroughly demolished. They had hit the site so hard
with the drone strikes that it had started to feel like an
earthquake. Now, there was just rubble.

His platoon
crossed a line of shrubs which bordered what was left of the
driveway. His heart began to race, then a couple of seconds later
he started to feel unsteady on his feet, his eye-line keeling off
to one side, the horizon tilting. He reached out and grabbed the
shoulder of the woman to his left, Lieutenant Kadalynn Royse. She
held her right hand up towards her face, then pointed towards the
ruins with her index finger.

Toan followed
the line of her finger, and he saw. Just a glimpse. The solitary
child standing in the wreck. Then either side of her, perhaps forty
foot apart, the two heads lifted up from the ruins, one all scales
and teeth, the other flashing a razor sharp beak, its large wide
eyes facing forwards, piercing black set in rings of gold. He lost
sight of the child, hidden by the hulking mass as the beast finally
pushed up, out of the ground. There was the answer; the heart
racing, the unease, the distant dread. There was the earthquake,
the nightmare, the threat of oblivion. The beast unfurled its wings
and the wind was so strong that the outermost platoons struggled to
stay on their feet.