Frey had never thought of himself as a man prone to homesickness. After all, he’d never had a real home. Patriotism was an affliction for people like Malvery and Harkins. To Frey, his country was just the place he happened to be born.
Not today, though. Today he dreamed of familiar shores. He’d have given anything for one honest Vardic raincloud. Or better still, a nice slate-grey sky, like you got in the North most days in autumn. He’d always found them depressing in the past, but he promised never to bad-mouth the weather at home again, if only someone would relieve this endless bloody heat.
The sand gave easily beneath his boots, making every step a struggle. Ugrik trudged alongside him. Each of them wore one half of the black sheet of tarp, which Frey had split down the middle with his cutlass. They’d put it across their backs and tied it with twine to their wrists and shoulders. It overhung their heads like crude cowls, it flapped in their eyes, and it caught around their calves and ankles. Ugrik assured him that exposed skin would burn quickly in the desert heat, but Frey would almost rather that than this. The tarp was ungainly, uncomfortably hot, and worst of all, he felt ridiculous. They looked like lost manta rays, or a pair of particularly rubbish kites.
They laboured up the flank of a massive dune that cut across their path. Ugrik was muttering to himself, as was his habit. Frey wasn’t sure if he was insane or just eccentric, but either way he didn’t trust the explorer’s competence. The sense of liberation and freedom he’d enjoyed had faded quickly once the discomfort of the march set in, and he began to wonder, far too late, if Ugrik was leading him on a wild goose chase.
Frey stopped just before the ridge of the dune and turned around with some difficulty, the tarp tangling around him like a sail. He rested his hands on his aching thighs and caught his breath.
It was getting towards evening, and the sun was lowering towards the horizon in the west, reddening the sky. The sight filled him with dread. Soon the night would come. He was suddenly seized with the horrible notion that he might have wasted the last day of his life slogging pointlessly through a desert with a cackling Yort nutbag for company.
Ugrik was lumbering up the slope in Frey’s wake, the relic clutched to his chest. Each step caused a miniature landslide. Frey was happy to let him carry the burden. He wanted to touch it as little as possible.
‘How much further?’ Frey asked.
‘Not far now, not far at all,’ Ugrik said blithely. He didn’t seem the least bit concerned by their predicament.
‘That’s what I thought you’d say,’ Frey murmured. He straightened and took a swig from his canteen. It was almost empty.
Ugrik climbed past him and up to the ridge of the dune. Frey screwed the top back on to the canteen, sighed, and followed.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Ugrik threw over his shoulder. ‘According to my calculations, we’ll be there well before nightfall.’
Frey joined him atop the crest of the rise. What he saw there took the last of the strength from his legs, and he dropped to his knees.
The desert stretched out before him, all the way to the horizon. As far as the eye could see, there were only dunes, shimmering in the heat-haze. It had to be fifteen, twenty kloms to the limits of his vision, and in all that distance, there was nothing but sand.
‘According . . .’ he muttered, and swallowed. ‘According to your calculations?’ He felt rage boiling up within him.
‘Allowin’ for a small margin of error, o’ course,’ Ugrik said cheerily.
Frey got to his feet and flung out one arm towards the empty horizon. ‘That’s what you call a small margin of error?’ he demanded in a strangled voice.
‘Here, now, there’s no need for losin’ your rag,’ said Ugrik.
‘You crazy son of a bitch!’ he screamed. ‘This is my last day alive! Don’t you get that? I could’ve been drunk, or stoned, or at the very least trying to get a sympathy shag out of Ashua! But instead I’m going to die here in the desert, in the dark, and there won’t be a single person here who ever gave a shit about me! You’ve killed me, you dumb Yort bastard! You’ve killed me, and what’s worse, I’m still wearing this stupid bloody tarpaulin!’
He flailed ineffectually, trying to dislodge the tarp from his back, then launched himself at Ugrik and clamped his hands round the explorer’s throat. All his pent-up fear had turned to fury, directed at this grinning idiot who’d cheated him out of the final precious moments of his existence. He was going to die in the same absurd manner as he’d lived, and it was too much to bear.
His fault, he thought, as Ugrik’s eyes bulged. His fault.
Then Ugrik rammed the relic into his belly. Frey’s foot slipped in the sand, and then the two of them were tipping, rolling, bouncing uncontrollably down the far slope of the dune. This flank was steeper than the one they’d climbed up, and there was no stopping themselves as they fell. They tumbled end over end, black tarp flapping around them. By the time they came to a halt at the base of the dune, they were thoroughly battered.
Frey pulled his face from the sand and pushed the tarp out of his eyes. He blinked.
He didn’t believe what he saw.
Swimming in the heat-haze, less than a klom away, there was an enormous oasis. Tall trees were densely packed together, thick with deep green leaves. Above the trees he could see the tips of strange structures, their details obscured by the haze. Thin towers, and arched constructions that curved like ribs.
He wiped his crusted lips and coughed. ‘Ugrik!’ he said, looking around.
The Yort emerged from beneath the desert like some mythical horror, sloughing off sand as he rose. He was still clutching the relic. ‘A-ha!’ he cried.
‘Tell me that’s not a mirage,’ said Frey.
Ugrik cackled. ‘What are you, mad?’
Frey stumbled to his feet and finally fought his way clear of the tarp. He threw it aside and glared at it. ‘How come we couldn’t see this place till we got close?’
‘Same reason your craft went down, I reckon,’ said Ugrik. ‘Same reason Peleshar’s gone missin’. Same reason you got that manky hand. They made it happen.’
Frey wasn’t so amazed that he couldn’t summon up a bit of indignation. ‘My hand is not manky. I’m cursed, alright?’
‘Whatever you say, Frey,’ he said, then chuckled. ‘Frey, say. Say, Frey, whaddya say?’
Frey ignored him. He’d be entertaining himself with that rhyme for hours if he got any encouragement.
‘I reckon,’ he mused, studying the oasis, ‘those ancient Samarlans were actually pretty bloody clever.’
Ugrik gaped at him. ‘You think the ancient Samarlans did this?’ He bellowed with laughter and lifted up the relic in his hands. ‘This thing is more than ten thousand years old! The Sammies could barely scratch their own arses back in those days!’
‘So who built them, then?’ Frey asked, pointing at the structures beyond the oasis.
Ugrik grinned his infuriating grin.
‘Azryx,’ he said.
And he walked off towards the oasis, leaving Frey staring after him.
Thirty-Nine
The Oasis – An Eye – Brass and Bone – ‘Someone’s Followin’ Us’ – The Drop
Frey pushed through the undergrowth. It was sweltering hot beneath the leaf canopy, but there was shade, and the trunks were dappled in the red light of the evening sun. Bats flitted, hunting insects. Unseen birds called to one another. The air was not so oven-dry among the trees, and Frey thought he smelt water.
Only an hour ago he’d been in the trackless depths of an endless desert, and this oasis hadn’t been here at all. But here he was, and it was real.
Ugrik led the way, red braids swinging, his broad back a mass of tattoos. Frey didn’t quite know what to make of him now. He might have a couple of screws loose, but if he’d been to half the places he said he had, he must be someone to be reckoned with. And after what Frey had just witnessed, he was ready to believe anything the Yort told him.
The
n they emerged from the trees into a small clearing scattered with bright flowers, and Frey saw it.
It was a city.
Frey wasn’t someone to be awed by history. He didn’t share Jez and Crake’s fascination with crumbling buildings and pointless art. But even he couldn’t suppress a shiver of wonder at the occasion. A lost city! A lost Azryx city! And he might be the first Vard ever to lay eyes on it.
The oasis was situated in a huge, shallow depression, at the bottom of which was an unevenly shaped lake. The city began at its edge and radiated away up the slopes. For the most part, they were so consumed by the undergrowth that it was hard to see the shape of them, but what he could see was amazingly well preserved. The burrowing plants had toppled some towers and collapsed some walls, but if this place really was as old as Ugrik said, then it had withstood the millennia with miraculous endurance. He glimpsed buildings in snatches, visible through a thick covering of strangling creepers or crowded by ancient trees that grew up against their flanks.
It was an alien place. There was a fundamental strangeness to it. It was not made of brick and mortar. Its curves were too smooth, and it had swooping lines that were beyond the ability of the best architects in Vardia or elsewhere. Whatever material they’d used must have been incredibly strong. Spidery pillars supported structures that seemed impossibly heavy. He saw a building with a vast elliptical space in its side, like a mouth, and realised that it was probably a window once. No Vardic window had ever been built so large.
Not stone, then. Some kind of ceramic, like the material they fashioned the blades of the relic from. Something the colour of yellowed bone, peeping from the trees. Perhaps this had once been a place of bright hues, or perhaps not. Either way, the colours had gone now, and left only the skeleton of a dead city.
But alien as it was, it was built for people. He saw stairs and the remnants of boulevards. There were doorways and walkways and even a ridiculously thin bridge, now a rail for a ragged curtain of vines and moss and flowers. The lake was surrounded by a wall, built one-third of the way up the slope. He traced its outline as it sewed in and out of visibility. There were oval gateways there, but the gates were long gone.
He only had a moment to take it all in before Ugrik grabbed him and pulled him down into a crouch. ‘Don’t get yourself seen,’ he warned.
‘Seen by who?’ Frey asked, faintly alarmed. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be someone else here.
Ugrik moved to the edge of the clearing, back into the undergrowth. Frey followed. Ugrik held aside a spray of leaves, allowing a view down the near slope.
‘Sammies,’ he said.
Some way below them, a large section of the city had been exposed. Vines had been cleared, trees uprooted, soil dug away. The earth-moving machines were still at work down there, carefully quarrying out the extraordinary buildings, reclaiming them from the earth. Around them moved the Sammies, dozens of them, heading in and out of doorways, coordinating the loading of items with small cranes. Some were gathered around tables where they pored over plans, while others milled or loafed in a busy campsite that had been set up in a plaza. Many of them had guns.
With the foliage gone, Frey could see the true strangeness of the city. Low, flat buildings that were little more than boxes sat next to humped, segmented constructions that looked like a row of crouched beetles. Nearby was a colossal ball, flattened at the bottom where it touched the ground, with no apparent windows and only a doorway at its base. He saw a landing pad on the edge of the bared streets, built atop a pillar that branched out like a tree to support it.
But all that paled in comparison to the centrepiece of the excavation.
It looked as if two giant hourglasses of brass and bone had been stood next to each other. They were linked across their lower halves by a complicated building of many curves and angles, but it was the hourglasses that drew the attention. Within their frames were bizarre assemblies made up of twisted rods of metal and squat stacks of discs. Orbiting each half of the hourglass was a brass arm, like a blade, that swept around the interior edge. The upper and lower arms rotated in different directions. Occasionally a section of machinery shifted, moving to a new position as if under its own command. The whole edifice gave an impression of whirling movement contained inside a rigid structure.
There was something inside those hourglasses. A coloured gas, the consistency of cloud, full of pale colours that made Frey’s eyes hurt. Within the gas he saw a hundred storms, miniature flickers of lightning, striking in flurries.
He had no idea what it did, but one thing he did know: it was active. And the Sammies had it.
‘How long have they been here?’ he asked.
‘My guess? Since the end of the Second Aerium War.’
Frey squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t look at those hourglasses any more. ‘This is why they called the truce? We thought they’d somehow found their own aerium source or something. Maybe on Peleshar.’
‘Reckon they found this,’ Ugrik grunted. ‘And they worked out what it was.’
‘But what good does it do them?’
Ugrik pointed down through the leaves to where a group of Sammies were using a crane to lift a massive metal device of coiled pipes and tubes on to the back of a tractor-trailer. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Frey.
‘Nor do they,’ he said. ‘But you can bet they’re gonna find out.’
‘Salvage? That’s what they’re after?’
‘Technology,’ he said. ‘There’s things in this city like you can’t imagine. And the Sammies want it all. They want to know how to do what the Azryx did.’
Frey was only just beginning to appreciate the enormity of the situation. ‘If they manage to reverse engineer Azryx technology . . .’
‘They’d be well nigh invincible, I reckon,’ said Ugrik. ‘And they’ll be in your back yard before your next shit.’
‘And then in yours.’
‘Aye.’
Frey whistled quietly. ‘Anyone else know about this?’
Outside of the Sammies? You and me.’ He cackled. ‘That’s why they slung me in solitary. Didn’t want me talkin’. I don’t s’pose they reckoned anyone would come lookin’, either.’
‘I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t managed to get stuck with that damn thing,’ Frey complained, pointing at the relic that Ugrik still held in his brawny arms.
‘Funny how things work out, eh?’ said Ugrik.
‘Hilarious,’ Frey agreed, his eyes narrowing.
‘At least you got cursed by the best,’ said Ugrik, scratching at his cheek.
‘That’s a good point, actually.’ Frey brightened as he looked at his gloved hand. ‘This is an Azryx curse,’ he said with some pride.
‘There you go, then,’ Ugrik said.
Frey returned his attention to the scene below them. ‘You know what this information would be worth to the right people?’
‘You got optimistic all of a sudden,’ Ugrik observed with some surprise. ‘How about we concentrate on sorting out the mess you’re in, first? Sun’s going down.’
He was feeling optimistic. He’d found the place where the relic had come from. Everything seemed possible now. He began to believe there might be a dawn.
Ugrik waved a hand. ‘Down there, by the lakeside. That’s where I found it. We’ll have to skirt round the Sammies, but there’s patrols all over, so be careful.’
Frey couldn’t see the exact building, but he didn’t need to. It didn’t seem all that far. All they had to do was get past the Sammies and put the relic back.
Easy.
Later, they found the eye.
By then they’d made their way downslope, and were nearing the outermost limits of the city. Ugrik had taken to muttering under his breath in Yortish again. They’d both put their shirts back on, warned by the purr and whine of insects that exposed flesh would end up bitten. The foliage rustled with birds and small wildlife. Frey was wondering if there was any
danger of encountering big wildlife when he suddenly pulled up short next to a cliff that rose up on their left.
‘Is that an eye?’ he asked.
‘Aye.’
‘That’s what I said. An eye.’
‘And I said aye.’
‘Yes! An eye!’
‘Aye! Aye meaning yes! Aye, it’s an eye!’
‘Oh.’
It was as big as Frey, smooth and white, staring emptily from within a mass of vines. It was set high off the ground, tilted at an angle, without brow or lid. In fact, it was hard to know how he recognised it as an eye at all. Perhaps he’d sensed the proportions of the surrounding face, which he’d mistaken for a cliff at first, masked as it was by trees and creepers. Or perhaps it was because it felt uncomfortably like it was watching him.
Now he had the eye, it was possible to estimate the rest of it. It was the same bone colour as the buildings in the city. He made out the outline of a heavy jaw, sunk into the earth. There seemed to be no nose, whether by design or by the ravages of time, and there was a muzzle of some kind. No human face, then. The head lay askance, half-buried, and it was truly colossal.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is one big statue.’
Ugrik gave a noncommittal grunt. Frey tried to see if the head was attached to a body, but he was foiled by the undergrowth. ‘They had some ugly-arse gods, huh?’ he commented.
When he looked back, Ugrik was holding up a pocket watch and pointing at it impatiently.
‘Oh, right! My imminent death!’ said Frey, slapping his forehead in mock-astonishment. ‘Totally slipped my mind.’
‘I don’t plan on gettin’ caught by the Sammies a second time,’ Ugrik growled. ‘Someone needs to fly me out o’ here when we’re done. And I doubt your crew’d be all that welcomin’ if I came back without you.’
Frey looked him over. ‘You’re not half as crazy as you pretend, are you?’
‘I’m not crazy, nor pretendin’ to be,’ he said. ‘If I was crazy, I’d have told you where we were goin’ when you asked. You’d have booted me off your craft right then, curse or no curse.’