Gaius breathed. There was even a flutter from his eyelids each time the woman’s fingers brushed his flesh. Perennius drew off the younger man’s gauntlets. He said, “So that I’ll go in the cave with you?”
“No, my friend,” the traveller said, concentrating on the injured man before her. “Because you’d do that anyway. We thought – they thought – ” and she looked at Perennius while her hands continued their gentle work of massaging Gaius’ temples – “that they were sending a machine back to root out those others…. And perhaps they were right, perhaps it was a machine they sent back. But I’m not a machine now, Aulus. I’ll do the job, because it is my job and my pleasure. But I’ll do it my way. Now, I’m going to leave you for a moment.”
Perennius nodded. He expected the woman to stand up. After a moment’s surprise, he realized his mistake. Calvus was gone from him, all right, but she had retreated not into physical distance but rather into her trance state.
The agent felt a twinge of fear, as if he were walking in front of a cocked and loaded catapult. He stood up. Whatever was happening was not directed at him.
Soon enough, though, they would – he would – have to deal with the remaining Guardian and whatever lay beyond. Perennius gave a harsh laugh. He spat away the ball of phlegm that choked him. No water now to drink when his mouth was clear, and no rest for the weary. No rest for the wicked. The agent bent down to examine Gaius’ prostrate form. Calvus crouched over Gaius like a mantis awaiting a victim … but Perennius could not save the youth, and he could not despite his habits bring himself to doubt the traveller’s good faith. You did have to trust somebody else, or you would fail and everything would fail.
Aulus Perennius had no use for failure.
Calvus straightened slightly. Beneath her hand, the injured courier sighed like a child relaxing in his sleep. Gaius was still unconscious, but his normal color had returned.
“I’ll need to get his armor off,” Perennius said. His voice broke. Looking away, he blinked repeatedly to clear his eyes of the tears. “I’ve got an idea for the shirt, and I need his helmet, and greave besides.”
“Take my hands, Aulus Perennius,” said the tall woman. She extended them. Her fingertips were cool on the agent’s palms. Even as Perennius opened his mouth to note the need for haste, the pictures began to form in his mind.
At the first, Perennius was not aware of what was happening, because the spires lit by richly-colored discharges were unlike any buildings he had seen. The agent’s mind accepted the images as signs of shock or madness. He felt the same horrified detachment that would have accompanied knowledge that the ground had fallen away beneath him and he was dropping toward certain death. Then details of awesome clarity penetrated. Perennius realized that he was seeing – or being shown – something by Calvus in a medium at which the traveller had never hinted.
Gray, segmented creatures used huge machines to bathe the spires in light. In form the creatures were the Guardians that Perennius had seen and slain, but now there were myriads of them covering the ground like shrubs on wasteland and directing machinery of a scale that dwarfed them. Ripples of livid flame dissolved swathes of the creatures, but still more of them crawled out of the cracking, heaving soil. One of the spires settled like a waterfall descending. The structure’s walls crumbled in sheets, spilling the figures within as bloody froth in the crystalline shards. The figures were tall, mostly quite hairless; they were as human and as inhuman as Calvus herself. The alien creatures swarmed and died and swarmed in greater numbers. Another spire began to collapse as the scene segued into –
something else in its way as alien. Men and women of proportions which the agent found normal sat one per small, eight-sided room. Perennius saw – visualized—simultaneously the individual units and the ranks and files and stacks of units comprising a whole larger than any construct he had seen, the Pyramids included. The humans had body hair and wore clothing, as did only the hirsute minority of those dying in the crystal spires of the previous scene. But though every detail of this folk’s activities was evident to Perennius, he comprehended none of it. The square shafts filling the interstices between alternate facets of the octagons were in some cases filled with conduits. Many shafts provided instead vertical passage for capsules which sailed up and down without visible mechanisms. None of the humans moved more than to reach or glance toward one of the eight shimmering walls of the units which held them. Suddenly, called by an unseen signal, everyone in the structure stood and fed themselves into upward-streaming shafts. They moved with the ordered precision of cogs engaging in a water-mill. And the scene blurred, shifting by increments too minute for separate comprehension to –