A A Attanasio by The Last Legends of Earth (epub)

Author:The Last Legends of Earth (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

THE SAGAS

Each person stands on a shadow.

No entering the temple without facing the demons.

Every mountain is but a tombstone under heaven.

The stream goes only where it must go. Follow it.

—admonishments from the Glyph Astra

The blind horizon of Mugna blackened the transparent shell of the droplift, and Fra Baba Bathra glimpsed his own reflection—bald, fetal-browed, lumpy—before starside swung into view, hurting his little eyes with the brash glare of the galaxy. Moments ago, he had been where he spent most of his life, languishing on thermal squabs in midstim euphoria. The afterglow rapidly thinned into the blunt details of the ordinary, and he chewed a gly-tab to buoy his mood. He hated being yanked from midstim. The abrupt drop from pleasure-trance to temporal reality soured him, no matter that he had been roused to attend to a situation of stark interest to the Face of Night.

Only after the droplift sighed to a halt and admitted him to the esplanade before the gruesome gateway to Perdur did the abject impersonality of his position, of his very life, come clear again. He straightened the folds of his black robe, swallowed the gly-tab, and stepped onto the mirror floor of the cliff-high palace. He did not look upon the gargoyles of tormented bodies cast in green amber or the spires of skulls or the scorpiontail buttresses and serpentcoil pillars. His gaze remained fixed ahead, to where a dolmen of scarlet rock set in the black wall of the palace framed the tiny figures of Neter Col and his captive.

The aides who had unplugged him from the midstim had already briefed him on everything the scyldar knew. There was no further use for the creature at this moment, but only Fra Baba Bathra, Prime Cenobite of Perdur, had the authority to dismiss him; so, Neter Col waited in broad stance with the girl he had taken folded over herself at his feet, her arm still in his clutch.

Fra Baba winced at the sight of the raw bone in the scyldar’s ripped socket. “Release her, Neter Col,” he said, above his own echoing footfalls. “You are dismissed.”

The scyldar dropped Chan-ti Beppu’s arm and strode toward the lustrous dark rampart. The collar of his cuirass was unlatched, and by that Fra Baba knew the zōtl rider had left. He drew a full breath of relief at that, for the unpredictable spiders had the implicit right to mount any human, even the Prime Cenobite of Perdur.

At the glisteny wall, nongyls scuttled from shadowed niches, their sucker mouths still fibrillating with the appetites they had been sating at the nutrient-glossed parapet. They crawled onto Neter Col, covering his torn socket and the jagged hole in his faceplate, and he slouched off to the vats.

“Chan-ti Beppu—” Fra Baba spoke to the curled-over woman, gently. Everything said in this polar palace was heard by the Face of Night, who had, through the Cenobite’s aides, already instructed him to protect the well-being and, if possible, the happy disposition of the woman. “I regret the suffering you endured to be here,” he said and sounded unconvincing even to himself.

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