It had a dark, ancient, ominous stain crusted on one side, and there were deep incisions on all four sides, visible as shadows. J.B. knelt to look at them, vaguely conscious that anyone watching him might think he was performing some secret act of worship to this god unknown.
There seemed to be some kind of writing hewn into the granite. The Armorer couldn’t read it, but he felt a vague unease, a feeling that his hands had suddenly become contaminated and sticky. He wiped them on the dry grass around the altar.
He blinked at the carvings, feeling that there was something wrong about them. They seemed to contain blasphemous suggestions of entities beyond time and space. The meaning was barely concealed from him by a ragged veil. If it was removed, then J.B. might understand all things.
And he might well go mad.
He leaned his back against the sun-warmed stone and slithered into a deep sleep.
And as he slept, they came gibbering for him.
He fought to wake himself from the living nightmare, but all in vain, trapped forever in the heart of a pitiless and relentless darkness.
SUSPENDED BETWEEN the two malfunctioning gateways, Krysty dreamed of a great fire that dropped from the sky and scorched the face of the earth.
Up in Harmony, her old home, she was a young girl. Barely past puberty, with tender, budding breasts, she was playing softball with friends on a high, flat expanse of cropped turf above the buildings of the ville. She was out in left field, shading her eyes against the sun, near the edge of the playing area, marked by a steep bank that rolled down into a ditch that held a clean, fast-flowing stream of pure water.
Patti van Onselen was at bat and had just cracked an enormous hit over Krysty’s head, the ball rolling down the incline and splashing into the water.
“Go get it!” called an older girl, sitting in the shade of some white-thorn bushes.
Krysty started after it, hearing the distant sound of an airplane way, way overhead. Part of her mind thought that it was strange, as there were no longer any planes in Deathlands. But part of her accepted it as perfectly normal.
The noise of the chattering stream was loud in her ears as she slithered over the edge, making her way down on her denimed rear toward the white ball that was bobbing along fifteen or twenty yards away.
There was a faint whistling from somewhere above her, but Krysty ignored it, focusing her attention on the softball, shutting out the yells and shrieks of her friends on the field behind her.
She darted along in the shadow of the steep bank, finally seeing the ball trapped in a small pool between shallows. Krysty splashed out to reach for it, gasping at the icy bite of the meltwater.
Her fingers had just touched the ball when the world seemed to explode.
There was a flash of light, so bright that it blinded Krysty, making her drop the ball as she pressed her fingers to her eyes, crouching by the stream.
While she was still there, paralyzed by shock, there was a great wave of noise and heat, like the horsemen of the apocalypse racing close overhead, with a blast of fire and a rumble like a thousand peals of thunder all rolled into one.
Krysty cried out, falling to her knees, smelling her hair scorching in the inferno that roiled above her.
Several long seconds drifted by, and the noise and the rushing, fiery wind all passed over. She came to her senses enough to realize that the steepness of the bank above had protected her from what had happened.
It took several long minutes before she recovered enough to stand on shaky legs and crawl up the slope toward the softball field.
The grass at the top was gone, replaced by a dark, powdery ash, and the air was filled with an overwhelming stench of scorching, like the time in the fall when the farmers burned off the stubble from their fields.
Very slowly Krysty pushed her face over the brink of the slope until she could see all around her.