Seeds of Earth (23 page)

With renewed determination he climbed to the Threshold platform, where a pair of lamps hung from curved poles. A masked Unburdener stepped forward and offered a small oval bowl, which he accepted, then drank from its narrow end. It tasted fresh, like skyleaf water only carrying a variety of subtle flavours that eddied slowly across his tongue. The door of the
vodrun
lay open and without hesitation he crouched to duck inside then sat on the plain bench carved from the interior. Fleetingly he wondered where the Listeners had found a seedpod of the immense
vunris
tree, supposedly
extinct on Umara. By the lamplight he could see that the
vodrun's
inner surface was covered with fine carving, patterns, faces, creatures of Segrana, and some strange shapes that looked like erratic, random outlines . . .

The Unburdener stood in the doorway, his wooden mask regarding him.

'Segrana awaits you,' came a female voice. 'Her purpose will show you all the pathways of the Eternal - be ready.'

Chel smiled, bowed his head. The Unburdener stepped back and swung the door shut, plunging him into darkness.

With eyes closed he leaned back against the rough podwall. He knew that the Cup of Light was meant to unfasten the moorings of his mind, but so far he felt quite calm and unchanged. The flavours from the strange drink still lingered in his mouth but were steadily fading, tastes of nuts and berries dissolving away to nothing - and just then he caught a whiff of smoke. He sniffed, quickly then deeply, sure that something was burning just outside the
vodrun.
Then he saw a glow next to the floor, bent down and saw a tongue of flame extending up the curved wall, splitting and spreading, a fine network of fire.

He called out and banged on the door, but it was shut fast from the outside and no answer came. Chel began to panic and fumbled on the floor for the stoppered flask of water that was usually left there. Nothing. The blazing web expanded, covering the whole of the pod's wall till he was crouched down in the centre, enclosed in a shell of quivering, rippling flames. The carven creatures crawled while patterns contorted and faces turned to him and spoke in harsh voices, demanding, commanding and condemning. The voices all ran together, echoing and changing as the flames fragmented and shrank, sinking into the wall of the
vodrun
until it glowed a rich reddish yellow.

The shapes and patterns carved there looked far more detailed now. Fascinated, he moved closer to study, just as more colours streamed across the wall, shades of dark green spreading up to and along one of those odd, erratic outlines while a deep blue flooded and filled the other side of it. Then an obscuring mass of opaque greyness drifted slowly across the upper part of the wall he was examining. All distress forgotten, he stared, suddenly realising that it was a coastline seen from orbit. He giggled and looked closer, following the shore round and down a long, curving stretch to a short peninsula shaped like a hook.

Just like the one where the Humans have their stilt buildings,
he thought.
Pilipoint Station ...

The details drew his gaze; engrossed, he looked still closer and the coastline leaped a little nearer. More details emerged, the texture of Segrana's vast expanse, the rough, dark surface of the Silversong Sea, then nearer still with coves and inlets becoming visible . .. vertigo stirred in his head, his chest, his stomach, and he tried to pull away from the dizzying vista.

Then the wall of the
vodrun
melted away, and with nothing to brace against he fell, limbs flailing as he shrieked, plummeting through layers of cloud in a headlong dive towards the ground. Soon he could make out treetops and wheeling birds, lines of waves and tiny figures walking along the shingle. And Segrana rushed up to embrace him.

Through layers of foliage he fell, a battering descent of broken branches, collisions and glancing blows. He felt every one, yet there was no pain, no sense of bones broken or blood spilt. He tumbled and rebounded down into the cool, humid darkness of Segrana's interior, down towards the forest floor, towards a sheltered pocket of old, impenetrable shadows where an ancient swamp lay. It quivered as he plunged into it, a black, gritty wetness grasping his struggling limbs, dragging him down further down . . .

Return to the soil, return to the seed of things ...

He was drowning yet not drowning, while immense thoughts coursed through his mind.

... to your soil, to your seed ...

The swamp faded, its enfolding dark trembling into misty night strewn with stars and swirling haze, and the rich light of a planet turning slowly overhead. Umara, the beautiful blue orb that he had watched countless times from the high towns of Segrana. But his gaze was drawn to another distant quarter of the sky where an array of glittering points moved steadily nearer, stretching across almost half the firmament, and behind it was another vast formation and behind that another and another. Then his mind . . .

His mind was within one of those points, a vessel crammed with metallic shapes, incomprehensible devices, all webbed with furious energies while lodged at the vessel's heart was a creature, an intelligent being ...

An enemy to be pitied, a knight of the Legion of Avatars, the truncated remnant of something that had once walked upright. Their race became entangled in its own technical hubris, eventually surrendering to a union with the machine, inveigled by promises of immortality. They hate the flesh and its flaws, a hate that bred fear and a hatred of other species less invaded by technology ...

Suddenly Chel was back, staring up into the deepness of the night as arrow-formations of glittering points swept towards the spreading web of Legion vessels. An eyeblink and he saw the graceful lines of the newcomers, long contours adorned with curved wings and vanes yet seemingly too few against the swarming attackers.

In their millions the Legion invaded from another universe, and battles like this bloomed in hundreds of star systems. Facing desperate odds, the High Ancients rallied together and wrought a terrible weapon in the cause of the Great Purpose ...

As battle was joined he was shown fleeting glimpses of clashes near other farflung worlds, saw scientists and workers of many races working without cease to finish the weapons that would end the Legion's destructive rampage, tunnels bored down into the deep layers of reality - warpwells.

Vast amounts of power were needed to bring the warpwells to life, so hundreds of millions of High Ancients gave up the energy of their minds and bodies to create those vortices of destruction. Witness their dignity as they sacrificed themselves to the greater good. A hundred thousand years ago, a sacrifice long forgotten by almost all, yet our memory is everlasting and we will deny the Unmaker a final victory . . .

Chel saw the warpwells reach out to drag everything into their dazzling maws, dust and meteorites, the debris of battle, lifeless bodies, warships of either side. Some Legion craft on the edge of the conflicts tried to escape but the High Ancients gave more minds to fuel the warpwells and their reach extended out to the space between the stars. He saw Legion vessels by the thousand drawn inexorably down, many reduced to wreckage, spilling vapour and ragged fragments, while others still grappled with the larger High Ancient warships, all funnelled inwards, crashing together, hull against hull. Then Chel was . ..

Chel was in the middle of it, hurtling downward amidst the grinding shriek of metal, the buzz of horrifying weapons and the roar of the warpwell vortex, whose ice-blue-spear-black light blurred everything. Suddenly, a world loomed - his second descent - rushing upwards, a dazzling bright eye that gaped, a lacuna of energies into which he plunged.

From all sides came glimpses of strange worlds and stranger firmaments, deranged landscapes, inconstant tracts, distortion, decay and desolation, fleeting and fading, a shadowy succession of realities through which he fell. Openings began to appear, pulling great swathes of mangled machines and vessels, and Chel seemed to see this from outside, see all the warships, Legion and High Ancient alike, disintegrate and scatter across the dark, deep layers of hyperspace. He realised that the same thing was happening at all the other warpwells, the utter destruction of the Legion of Avatars, millions, perhaps billions of them, a cataclysm to stagger the mind.

Could anything survive such a descent? The rushing blur slowed as he fell with the battered, broken remnants into a foggy abyss webbed with flickers of silver radiance, slowing still further, drifting down past black cliffs . . .

Many died that still many more and their successors might live on . . . yet Unmaker takes many forms . . .

The cold shadows faded, and he blinked slowly as he looked up. Once more he stood on that high place, gazing at the planet overhead and almost crying out when he saw that it was burning from horizon to horizon. A few stretches of pockets were still green but smoke veiled the surface of Umara, great wings and tails of darkness sweeping across forests, plains and mountains.

Ten thousand years ago Unmaker came again as the Dreamless ...

Something crossed the bright edge of the planet, a strange cluster of spikes growing as a large silhouette came into view, a solid curve of blackness, some kind of disc with antennae and probes radiating, Chel guessed. Then a rod of polychromatic light stabbed out and something exploded in planetary orbit, shedding a burst of illumination upon the silhouette. Chel saw that it was a massive globe covered with countless columns and spires of varying sizes, wavering like the spines of a colossal sea creature. And there were others drifting in from the lightless gulf of interplanetary space, black bristling orbs unleashing glittering barbs that fell on the world below.

From a mountaintop on Umara he saw them strike and tear apart the land, great slabs of ground and forest rising up, twisting and disintegrating in the grip of a terrifying destruction. But the Uvovo held their positions throughout the burning, tormented forests. Chel could see them in underground chambers, in hilltop strongholds, in fortified caves, all working with strange mechanisms through which the green force of the planet-girdling forests was channelled.

As I once was, with unity and with a voice . . .

He saw the Waonwir temple in its original state, pillared, open floors rising from the hollowed-out prominence, Uvovo everywhere engaged in serious tasks. Its uppermost levels tapered to a slender tower that sprouted numerous leaflike vanes which shimmered with energy. Periodically, a massive flash obscured great stretches of forest and a glowing membrane of light would leap up into the sky, straight and fast, flying up out of the atmosphere and wrapping itself around one of the Dreamless vessels. Spines sheared and snapped, the globular hulls cracked, the energy membrane surged inside and found . . . nothing.

So weak, the last remaining, yet an old ally came . . .

Chel knew the story in his heart - at the darkest moment of the battle, when it seemed that the Dreamless had won, the Ghost Gods arrived - and now he was seeing it. Their ships were immense and fashioned to resemble ferocious beasts, four- and six-limbed, winged and serpentine, many-tentacled and carapaced, all bigger than mountains and numbering but thirty all told. When battle was joined they were like giants assailed by insects, but the Dreamless were relentless. Wave after wave, horde upon horde of their machines was hurled against the Ghost Gods' massive vessels, and while most were destroyed a few got through the weapon barrages and shields. Of those even fewer survived the defences and Sentinels, managing to break through the hull, and of them just a handful evaded the interior guards.

But that was all that was needed to seed ducts and pipes with swarms of deadly metal vermin, to infect the vitals with contagion. Eventually, even these colossal craft began to succumb one by one to the pitiless tide of Dreamless machines, to fail and break apart amid blossoming clouds of fire.

And Segrana, knowing that defeat could now be avoided only by paying a terrible price, gave up the greater part of itself. The forces of the world-forest were diverted into opening a way to the domains of hyperspace where the Dreamless kept their vast citadels. There went the greater essence of Segrana to infiltrate those strongholds, to spread itself transformed and unseen across every sense and knot of fleshless mind, every source of power, and to perish in a cataclysmic destruction from which not a single machine escaped. The interlinked meshes of communication and domination which had given them such strength were also the cause of their downfall.

Such a victory, such loss, yet Unmaker never wholly dies.

The vision of ships and fortresses burning in star mists faded.

These new Dreamless know of our great well, the last, and they hunger for it.

Sky-filling planetary vistas rolled away into shadow.

Weak and untested, still we must prepare for battle, for invasions, for desperate sacrifice.

Cold silence enclosed him, limbs held fast, body curled up, thoughts at rest, eyes tightly shut.

Your time approaches. Elders wish you remade but I want less from you, much more later.

Was he inside a shell or was he the shell that was going to crack open and reveal something new? Some kind of pressure eased and he could relax fingers from gripping, arms chest-wrapped, shifting his limbs a little, then shakily standing, feeling with eyes still closed for the
vodrun
chamber inner wall, running a hand over the rough carvings.

'Are you well, seeker?' came the Unburdener's voice from outside.

Chel smiled as he heard the sound of the door being unfastened and cracked open his eyes to the lamplight pouring in.

And screamed.

As soon as he heard the screaming, Listener Eshlo broke off from his meditations and climbed quickly up to the Contemplation platform then to the Threshold. It was not unusual for the freshly husked to be overwhelmed and distraught, although such a vocal outburst was quite rare. But when he clambered onto the small shelf he was helped to his feet by a panicky Unburdener who pointed to the
vodrun.
Its door stood open and the naked, unchanged form of Cheluvahar lay slumped half inside, head bowed in the shadows, shoulders trembling as he wept uncontrollably.