CHAPTER ONE

Unearthing of the Past

The aspens whispered, “Hush, hush.”

As if they knew something grand and important would soon happen, every tree in the grove waved a million golden hands for the attention of the creatures below. “Hush, everyone. Be still. Look around you. Feel, and smell, and listen. The time has come.”

The rocky ground dropped away to the south and even more steeply east and west, for this grove grew on a quickly ascending ridge. The vast, dense canopy obscured clouds forming in the west, but the storm made itself known by the cooling breeze it pushed up the slope—giving voice to the aspens—and by a flat wall of dark purple-grey visible between the quivering leaves.

Suddenly the westering sun broke through a gap in the clouds, its rays glowing through the translucent leaves in a dazzling pattern of brilliant gold against the slate sky. Diffused color warmed every surface under the luminescent canopy, dappling the white trunks with dancing yellow light. A few short conifers stood dark and resolute against the ochre landscape.

This tranquil cacophony was disturbed when, down the southern slope, over a rocky outcrop, the head of a man appeared. He was bobbing and weaving, eyes intense, searching for safe footfalls as he ran uphill through the trees. As he ascended, his shoulders and pumping arms became visible, then his churning legs, and last his feet leaping from stone to ground to stone. He headed to a cluster of lichen-painted boulders, the tallest of which stood nearly upright above his head. Using hands and feet he scrambled to the top and stood, hands on hips, breathing heavily.

He was a tall man, closer to seven feet than to six, yet he was dwarfed by the aspens around him. The leaves already fallen to the dark soil were near the size of his fist, and the largest of the trunks were the breadth of a wine-barrel, yet the trees still seemed slender as they held their branches aloft far over his head.

For a moment he searched all round, but then he seemed to hear the aspens’ counsel and lifted his eyes to the melee of leaves. He laughed and slowly turned about, taking a long, full breath, filling his nostrils with the scent of pine, rich soil, and distant rain. He laughed again at the leaves.

He sat on the boulder and rested his elbows on his knees. Still scanning the surrounding forest, he said under his breath, “Where did you go?”

Clearly he was accustomed to the outdoors and to running; he was lean and well-defined, and his rich skin color was even browner from the sun. His hair was dark and wavy, and he had grey eyes set deep under strong brows. Despite the autumn cool of the montane forest, his skin glistened with sweat.

He wore loose, earthy clothing, comfortable and suited for freedom of movement. His legs were bare from the knees down to sturdy sandals held with straps about the ankle. Above a wide woven belt, a square of some grayish metal hung in the center of the chest like some kind of amulet, affixed so that it stayed flush against his heart when he ran. It was a bit wider than a hand-breadth, and its surface was flat, unadorned, and unpolished.

The man’s name was Dabaz.

Suddenly a loud, harsh call burst forth behind him—something between a dog’s bark and a raven’s croak. He spun and glimpsed through a crowd of white trunks a dark shape vanish over the steep eastern falloff. He called, “Aha! Turave! You didn’t lose me after all.” He leapt off the boulder and raced over the ridge in pursuit.

This aspen grove was healthy and old, extending well over the eastern slope Dabaz now descended. A few fallen trees and a little undergrowth cluttered the forest floor, the open spaces punctuated by scattered families of grey boulders scumbled with red and green lichen.

To the rocks, the trees and soil seemed mere transients: the rocks held their ground while the loamy soil flowed down the slope around them and the trees sprung up and rotted away. To the rocks, the man seemed even less: only an ephemeral, vapory streak through the air; meaningless. They could not know their perception was inverted.

The steeper the slope, the rockier the route became, and here Dabaz spent nearly as much time leaping through the air off high outcroppings as he did bounding and sliding down the slippery soil. Here he was at an advantage over the turave because, though it was a matchless runner, it would not leap down, instead weaving its way through the rocks and trees.

Now and then he caught glimpses of the creature, and the reason for its speed could be guessed. It ran on two legs like an ostrich but was not likewise gangly and awkward: its head was in better proportion to its body, the legs and neck were thicker, and it had a long tapering tail. Its length from teeth to tail-tip exceeded the height of the man. Its hide seemed more like that of a lizard than of a bird: close-knit scales, with mottled vertical stripes in shades of dark grey and a light belly. The glimpses also revealed that its pace was not a flight for life, for its running seemed almost leisurely, checked with circumspect pauses—and in Dabaz’s mad downhill dash, he was even able to gain on the turave.

The storm was now moving on to threaten some other mountain, and as man and beast flew down the hillside, they burst through patches of sunshine and cloud-shadow until Dabaz was reaching the limit of his ability to hold his pace.

If haste sometimes makes waste, he learned it too late: just as he went to leap from the top of a boulder, he saw that the drop was easily two dozen feet to the slope below. With no time to change course, he leapt through the air toward a young aspen several feet beyond the cliff edge. He slammed into the trunk and wrapped it up, thrashing the branches above and creating a shower of leaves. Clutching the trunk barely slowed his descent. As he slid, the short knob of a broken branch dug into him, tearing his amulet free from his chest. For an instant he was caught around the neck by its strap, then he broke free and fell prostrate to the ground a couple of yards below.

Dabaz groaned, then he chuckled a little at himself before rising to his knees to survey the damage. The knob had caused a wide scrape up and across his stomach and ribs before skipping over to the inside of his left bicep. The scrape was just now turning from white to red. But on his arm, blood freely flowed from under a trapdoor of flayed skin the size of a large coin. Compressing the wound with his opposite hand, he switched his attention to his amulet. He groaned worse: it was severely bent and its front surface was etched with spidery cracks. The injuries were bad enough to terrify a child and send it wailing to its mother; to Dabaz it meant only blood and pain, but the amulet was a real loss.

The creature was nowhere in sight, but he gathered himself and continued down, now cautiously. The ground began to level, and the aspens soon gave way to large aromatic pines. Before long, off to his left, the sound of a stream gurgling down its stony course called to him. Through the green gloom under the thickening trees he followed the sound. Even after a long warm summer, the water was quite cold in his mouth. With a grimace he tended to his bleeding gouge, gladly finding the wound coagulating. His scrape looked far less severe, except its fierce stinging was now seeping through to his backbone.

Just as he began to wash the drying stream of blood from his arm, the croak sounded again. Four or five dozen yards downstream the turave was watching him, glistening waterdrops falling from its mouth. It stooped for another drink then continued its descent. Dabaz chose to follow.

The turave and the stream shortly led him to a clearing. Straight ahead a red-streaked cliff soared high above, glowing with sunlight. A powerful river squeezed its way past the foot of the cliff from left to right, funneled between the steep places on either bank. It disappeared over a ridge, drawing Dabaz’s eye to the vast valley beyond, blue and hazy in the afternoon light. Though he had never set foot in this spot, he guessed from the river’s breadth and orientation that this was the Stofe, the tributary that flowed southward to meet the great river Dascan out of the west, converging in the heart of his quiet village of Buchhorne far below.

The churning river leapt down the boulder-choked gorge in a series of brilliantly sunlit cascades. It zigzagged between the feet of the eastward cliff and the westward slope as they competed for each other’s territory, heedless that their encroachment threatened the path of the river. But only the river ever won the timeless battle, for in time it carried stone and stump and soil away down the valley.

Dabaz quickly realized that further eastward progress was hopeless—neither the river nor the cliff would kindly step aside for him. But the turave found what it had been seeking, and therefore so did he: on this side of the river grew a massive opuntia ripe with fruit. The cactus easily exceeded three dozen feet in breadth, stretching upriver to their left, with paddles the size of dinner plates and rich red pears the size of spring rabbits.

The turave, though unafraid, remained wary of the man and chose the uphill end of the opuntia. Dabaz sat at the lower end near where the stream in its final moment lost itself in the Stofe.

He was not surprised to find these pears unprickly; he had never heard of a plant with spines or thorns or poison. In place of spines, opuntia had small orange tufts on its pale green paddles, and vivid yellow tufts on its red pears. Dabaz drew a small grey blade from within his belt and sliced off the nearest fruit. He plucked off one of the yellow tufts, placed it on his tongue, closed his eyes, and lifted his face to the sun. “Now that’s…” he mumbled, but suddenly the plant’s virtue filled his senses. “Oh!” His eyes opened wide. “Well, then.” He plucked off another tuft and studied it. “So little, yet…” He shook his head. “…yet so worth it. Worth it all.”

He glanced up at the turave and said, “Many thanks, my new friend. I’ll keep this place a secret.” The creature did not look up from the large fruit under its foot; it was too busy tearing piece after piece with its sharp teeth and throwing them back to swallow them. It did not mind sharing its treasure with the man, for it was unaware how greedy mankind could be, nor how treacherous they soon would become.

With his feet cooling in the stream, Dabaz was now cutting slices of the fruit’s flesh, relishing the taste of the juicy red center, the tender skin, and the powerful yellow tufts. He tried them all separately and in varying combinations, all the while making happy little noises he was unaware of.

Though it shortly would fall below the southwest ridge, the sun now shone confidently on the man. The opuntia gave him renewed strength, the crisp mountain stream quenched any remnant of his thirst, and the elixir in the yellow tufts filled his mind and heart with lightness and drove away thoughts of his injuries. The chill of the autumn breeze was countered by the penetrating heat of the high-elevation sun, leaving him perfectly contented.

Suddenly the turave issued a quick, high-pitched whine. Dabaz spun to find it tense and alert. Its head was raised full height, darting this way and that, and its intelligent yellow eyes could not seem to find the source of its trouble. Just as suddenly it dashed away up the slope they had descended, and Dabaz saw what it means to be fast. It vanished into the trees, leaving its third cactus fruit unfinished on the ground. Stung out of his reverie, Dabaz thought it best to rise and flee as well, if he must. He saw no danger, but trusting the beast’s more acute senses, he began to strap on his sandals.

Then he felt it. It started as a quivering under him, soon building to a violent shaking. Before long the entire gorge thundered. Massive boulders began to rattle off and bound down the cliff, exploding into the water and throwing splashes high into the air. As he was backpedaling to escape the barrage, the entire cliff face broke free and came sliding down with a roar. At that he simply turned and ran, not hearing himself shouting in terror.

The cliff wall slammed into the river with such force the shock sent Dabaz reeling to the ground. He threw his arms over his head as a rain of rocks and water fell all about him. He lay there, bouncing about, paralyzed as the earth continued to shake apart underneath him. “Oh, help! Oh, help me! Initespri!” was all he could think to call out. Boulders continued to rumble down behind him, and he heard huge pines to his front crack and splinter and come crashing to the ground. He lay coughing in the dust as the earth slowly regained its temper.

Though everything was still, he remained prone a few more moments. His back and legs had been battered, but nothing seemed broken—only bruised and bleeding. At last he stirred and cautiously gained his feet. A block of stone nearly five feet across had half buried itself in the soil just inches from his head. He stumbled slowly back from it, unable to tear his eyes away, overwhelmed by the realization of his narrow escape.

Finally he turned about and surveyed the scene. The ground was damp where the wave had soaked into the soil. Rocks and gravel had been flung far and wide, trampling the undergrowth. The opuntia lay hidden beneath an immense jumble of sharp, jagged boulders, some the size of houses. Thick dust choked the air, and the last rays of the sun streaming between trees on the ridge line threw yellow beams of light through the swirling cloud. Tall pines, their roots moments before anchored to the cliff’s summit, littered the base of the cliff. Already a little pool was forming upstream from the chaos of the shattered cliff face, where, for today, the cliff had succeeded in hindering the flow of the river.

Never before had Dabaz felt the ground shake, and he had only vaguely heard the ancient tales of earthquakes, so the idea of an aftershock could not form in his mind. He did, however, want his other sandal, so he limped back toward the cactus in hope of recovering it. All he found was one undamaged cactus pear in a space between razor-edged blocks. He cut it off to save for later.

The river was now passable to anyone willing to risk climbing over the destruction. He clambered halfway across it and looked around from this new vantage point. The aspens at the top of the western ridge were crowned with glowing gold. The snow-dusted mountains to his north glowed orange from their sunward faces. The southward flow of the Stofe, now a weak trickle, fell out of sight toward the wide hazy valley of the Dascan, beyond which rose the indigo hulk of Mount Aistus, its glaciated summit rising over four miles, penetrating a thin layer of clouds. And the cliff face to his east was now clean, fresh rock that had never before tasted wind or rain.

Partway up the cliff, just above the climbing shadow cast by the ridge behind him, a strange cave caught Dabaz’s eye. It looked black against the sunlit rock. The opening seemed more like a hole than a cave, for it was unnatural and squarish in shape, as if men long ago might have delved it as a tunnel. But there had been no opening in the original cliff face; Dabaz was sure of that. If this were a tunnel, it began partway inside a mountain. His curiosity began to drown out his fear of the quake. The cliff was less steep now than a few moments before. His decision was made. He found a suitable route up a series of cracks and quickly ascended.

He pulled himself up into the mouth of the cave dozens of yards above the shattered rocks below. It was not black inside as it had seemed, and if a tunnel, it only bored about forty feet into the rock. A flow of hot, stifling air issued out of the opening, carrying a sharp, pungent smell that made Dabaz cough and sputter.

The cave clearly had been made by men, for the inner surfaces were lined with some warped, corroded metal which had been ripped away and mangled at the opening. Rusty, twisted pipes still clung to the right-hand wall in a couple of places, and broken rectangular objects were strewn about. Along the lining in the ceiling and floor he found symmetrical rows of squarish metal bars that were partly embedded in amorphous rock. Protruding from the left-hand wall was an irregular pattern of large boxy shapes.

His eyes had adjusted enough for him to descend the sloping floor into the mountain. He slowly worked his way back, gingerly finding places for his bare foot among the broken debris, holding a piece of his shirt over his mouth and nose to hinder the stench. The cave came to an end at a large configuration of odd-shaped rusty parts and more protruding rock. He still felt the flow of foul air, and it seemed to emanate from gaps between the rusty parts. Behind him, the mouth of the cave fell completely into shadow, and suddenly it struck him he had little chance of reaching his front door in Buchhorne before black of night.

As he turned to hurry out of the cave, something seemed to rip through him in a great number of staccato bursts, as if a thousand frozen spears shot through his heart and lungs. He fell to the floor in agony. A different, thicker, more dreadful feeling gripped him, making his hair stand on end and wrenching the pit of his stomach. As he tried to crawl toward the opening, hundreds more of the icy shocks passed through him. He could contain no longer and left a rivulet of cactus and water snaking down toward the back of the cave. Then, just as suddenly, the shocks ceased.

When at last he stopped writhing, he dragged himself to his feet and slowly began hauling himself out, doubled over, hanging onto the rusted pipes with one hand. As he descended the cliff, he kept telling himself that the excruciating shocks were only his body’s reaction to the stress of the day.

It was, in fact, something far, far worse.