Gold Read online

  From the Depths: Gold

  Adam Heine

  Copyright inXile entertainment inc. 2014

  Published by inXile entertainment inc.

  Publishing at Smashwords

  FROM THE DEPTHS:GOLD

  A Torment: Tides of Numenera Novella

  by Adam Heine

  Gate to the Abyss

  Chapter 1

  Luthiya twisted the synthsteel rod anxiously. The grainy metal, born of another time, felt unusually cool as it abraded her palms. Ama could not have been wrong about it; the nano knew more about the numenera than, well, anyone. If Ama said the rod was a numenera weapon, then that was what it was.

  It probably wouldn’t go off on its own, but Luthiya held it away from her body anyway. A weapon should be a good thing. Her people were alone in a strange land now. Who knew what kinds of monsters lurked in the bowels of these ruins? Weapons meant protection.

  Except when they didn’t.

  She made her way out of the bone tower, her footsteps echoing throughout the vast entrance hall—the Marrow Chamber, they called it. Some long–dead civilization had carved a city out of volcanic rock and the indurate bones of an enormous beast. Not even magma had damaged the bones; it was mind–boggling that there’d been a people capable of shaping them. The Marrow Chamber was in one of the larger towers, dug out of one of the creature’s splayed ribs. Friezes and scenes carved from daily life striped the walls. Slitted windows dotted the upper portion of the hall where corridors looked down onto the room. It had probably been a meeting hall or a village square once, before its creators had died.

  And they had died, or maybe they’d been chased off. They’d left a lot behind.

  The Marrow Chamber had become a village square for Luthiya’s people too, though it was nearly empty now. Only the water collectors were there this early in the day, gathering water from the hot spring into cooling jars. Luthiya puffed a lock of hair out of her face; there were only a few hundred of her people left now. Compared to Shuenha, this place will always feel empty, she thought.

  Her shoes slapped against the petrified floor as she crossed the chamber to the main exit. There was no door there, only a faint blue shimmer—one of the force walls Ama had helped them restore. It kept out the worst of the sweltering heat and the fumes. Luthiya left the tower, trembling as the force wall’s energy slithered across her skin. She’d never get used to that.

  A blast of heat and noise struck her in the face. Her eyes had to adjust to the dim light and perpetually darkened sky. Against any kind of sense they’d taken refuge in the fields of Ossiphagan, an unsleeping nest of volcanoes. Ama had brought them here. She wouldn’t say why. It was safe, which was what they needed. And it was close to Shuenha—good for those who hoped to one day take back their home.

  Good for everyone but Luthiya.

  There was no day in Ossiphagan. Light came from the molten rock itself, flowing in eternal rivers to the Black Plains below. Luthiya could hardly remember the sun anymore. Her mother used to talk about the Gate of Abaddon. Luthiya had always thought it was figurative.

  Why did anyone ever choose to live here? The ruins were millennia old. She’d once thought the volcanoes had erupted after the city was built, driving out the original owners, but Ama said no. She never said why she thought so. Perhaps the more worrisome question was what had driven them out.

  A natural bridge stretched out from the bone tower across a glowing chasm. Khapah would be at the other end, teaching the others to fish. Luthiya squeezed the synthsteel rod again and resumed walking, reaching the other side of the chasm all too quickly. Her friend Jio was leaning over the edge, a river of magma running far below. Khapah held the back of his shirt to make sure he didn’t fall. Other youths Luthiya’s age crowded around to watch.

  “The trick,” Khapah said, “is patience. Pull the net up slowly, else you’ll eat nothing.”

  Khapah was the de facto leader of the Shue people, though he’d seen fewer than twenty–four harvests. Luthiya scowled. Most of the girls were watching Khapah more than the lesson.

  Jio moved his hands slowly, like he was pantomiming pulling a string up a few fingerwidths at a time. Weird lesson, Luthiya thought, but as she drew closer something shimmered. There was a string there, so thin she could barely see it.

  A glob of magma floated out of the river below. As Jio hauled up the string, the magma dripped off and cooled until all that was left were two round salamanders. They seemed to float in the air, caught in a net so fine as to be invisible.

  After a few more minutes of drawing up the net, Jio’s catch hung suspended in front of him. The brown salamanders wriggled inside the fine mesh, unable to escape. “Now what?” Jio said.

  Luthiya frowned. “Now you kill them.”

  “It’s true.” Khapah laughed. “You missed my fishing lesson, Thiya.”

  “I’ll live.”

  Jio stabbed the salamanders through the head with a needle knife. Luthiya winced at each creature’s squeal. Their legs flapped for a few seconds, then the creatures were gone.

  “You won’t live long if you don’t eat,” Khapah said, still smiling as he tore off one of the salamander’s seven legs. Like everything else about this place, the salamanders were strange—creatures that swam through lava, yet could be eaten raw. Khapah handed the leg to her. “I’ll give you a private lesson sometime.”

  Luthiya felt her cheeks go warm, even in the heat. She took the leg and sat down.

  There really was nothing else to eat in this place. The salamanders’ deaths meant the Shue could live. So why did it bother her? Back in Shuenha, her family had herded animals—pigs, burkfowl, and limmils. Killing to eat was part of life. Until the Tabaht took that life away, parents and all.

  She took a bite of the salamander leg. Such a strangement: the salamander was raw—she knew it was raw—but it tasted exactly like roast burkfowl.

  Khapah tore a piece off for each of the others, giving one of the circular bodies to Jio. “Best pick to the hunter. There are more nets in the bones.” He pointed toward the ruins across the bridge. “You may hunt whenever you’re hungry with two rules: catch twice as much as you eat, and don’t fall in. We need you more than the nets.”

  He dismissed the others, leaving Luthiya alone with him and Jio, who still had to clean the net.

  Luthiya came over to help him.

  Khapah waved a hand toward her face. “You’re darker than the ash today. What’s in there, makoeh?”

  She blushed again at the nickname. It meant ‘little sister,’ something most of the survivors had taken to calling her. But it sounded different coming from Khapah. “Why do you tell them that?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “Well.” Luthiya shifted her legs underneath her. “If the nets fall, we have no way to eat. If we fall, it’s not…”

  Jio snorted. “It’s one less to feed.”

  Luthiya punched him in the shoulder, though that’s exactly what she’d been thinking.

  “Our people matter,” Khapah said. “We will always find ways to eat, but if the Shue die, then the Shue die.”

  Luthiya thinned her lips. She lived for the Shue as much as anyone. It was all she did. If she stopped looking to others’ needs even for one moment, her own anguish came screaming back. “But are we so important?”

  Khapah laughed again. He laughed often. Maybe that was how he dealt with his own loss. “So philosophical tonight.”

  Jio scoffed. “You know Thiya. She’s always philo— philofossi—”

  Luthiya punched him twice more in the same spot.

  “Ow!” Jio rubbed his arm. “What for?”

  “The first was for trying to mock me.” She smirked. “The second was for failing at it.”

  Khapah threw back his head and howled
in laughter. “Watch your mouth, Jio,” he said. “This one’s tough and smart.”

  Luthiya ducked her head, grinning in spite of herself.

  Jio huffed, massaging his bruise. “So did you ask Ama about the rod?”

  Both of them looked at her expectantly, and all her worries rushed back. She put down the net, gripping the rod in both hands. “Yes.” She handed it to Khapah, glad to be rid of the too–cool synthsteel.

  Jio grinned and scooted closer. “So what is it?”

  Luthiya sighed. It wasn’t that she hated weapons—her father had saved her life with one—but she knew her people, and Khapah especially. She knew where this conversation would lead. Khapah had once been the kindhearted carpenter’s apprentice down the road, and he was still kind, but…

  “She called it an ‘incendiary’ device.” She took some joy from the confused look on Jio’s face.

  “A what?”

  “It shoots fire,” Khapah explained. The mirth had left his eyes. He looked at the rod with a warrior’s intensity.

  “Sort of.” Luthiya tried to remember the details of what Ama had told her. “It makes some kind of bubble at a set range, even inside another object, then causes an explosion within that bubble.”

  Both of the boys’ eyes widened, becoming as round as the salamanders they’d just eaten.

  Luthiya’s shoulders drooped; she knew Khapah’s next words before he spoke them.

  “Thank you, makoeh. This will speed the day we return to Shuenha.”

  “Why?” Luthiya couldn’t stop herself. The question burned inside her every time someone spoke of home. Many times a day. “Why do we have to return to Shuenha? What can we do there but die and die again?”

  Jio gaped at her. “That’s our home. Why wouldn’t we go back?” He looked from Luthiya to Khapah and back. “Don’t you want revenge?”

  Luthiya grimaced. Of course she wanted revenge. The Tabaht had taken everything, killed everyone. There were no more elders, no small children, no fighters left but Khapah and a few others. Only a few hundred survivors who had been too weak or scared to fight, but still strong enough to get away. The Tabaht had stripped their life from them.

  But revenge is why the Tabaht attacked us. Her mother had warned her as a child, and she’d since seen it for herself: the Tabaht attack the Shue, so the Shue hurt the Tabaht, who take vengeance on the Shue. The Tabaht had gone too far this time. They deserved more than death, and Luthiya hungered, ached to give it to them. But it would end in more ache.

  A part of her envied her parents. They, at least, had peace.

  “Thiya.” Khapah squeezed her arm gently. “It is what our families, rest their spirits, left us to do. This is not the first time the Tabaht have taken Shuenha. Our ancestors spilled their blood for that land. Our parents and grandparents fought to keep it. It’s not about the land or revenge. It’s about our right to exist.”

  “We exist here.”

  Khapah smiled. “So. Maybe it is about revenge a little. But Shuenha is our rightful home. This place is—”

  “Abaddon’s Abyss,” Jio said.

  Luthiya looked down at the salamanders, one of whose tails twitched posthumously. “We’ll die if we go back.”

  “If we went back today, perhaps.” Khapah nodded. “But soon, you children will grow strong, learn to fight. These ruins are full of the numenera, like this.” He held up the rod. “If we can find enough weapons, the Tabaht will not stand a chance.”

  Luthiya studied her skirt—ragged now from months of wear, with no fabric to replace it. The Tabaht had their own weapons, some even more terrible than the synthsteel rod. There was a reason the Shue had never completely thrown off their rule.

  “What about Ama?” Khapah said. “Does she feel as you do?”

  “Ama…” Luthiya said. The nano was an enigma to most of the Shue, as mysterious as the relics she researched. She had appeared to them a few months ago, just after the attack. She’d led them to safety, but now showed no indication that she wished to lead them beyond that. “She spends all her time in the chantry, or even deeper. I think she’s looking for something.”

  “To help us?” Khapah said hopefully.

  Luthiya shook her head. She spent more time with Ama than the other Shue did. The nano had taken a liking to her. And despite the fact that Ama was so aloof all the time, Luthiya had taken a liking to her as well. Ama had helped them reactivate the city’s force walls and work the salamander nets, but she didn’t seem interested in their revenge. Maybe that was what attracted Luthiya to her.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “What kind of strangements does she keep hidden in there?” Jio scooted forward. “I bet she’s got masses of weapons like that rod.”

  Luthiya glared at him. “We can’t take her things. If it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t even be talking about revenge. That’s like stealing from an Aeon Priest.”

  Jio cocked his head to one side. “I thought she was an Aeon Priest.”

  “You’re dumb as a field crab,” Luthiya huffed. Ama had told them time and again she had nothing to do with the Priests, but because of her knowledge of the numenera, most people had trouble thinking of her any other way.

  “He’s not wrong though, Thiya. She can help us like no other.”

  Luthiya gave Khapah a worried look. “What do you mean?”

  “Would you do something for me?”

  Luthiya could do nothing except nod.

  “Keep an eye on Ama. She finds things we can’t, or things we miss in our ignorance. I don’t want you to steal from her, but if she has anything we can use, tell me about it. Maybe she’ll agree to help us willingly. Can you do that?”

  He didn’t need to ask again; Luthiya had already agreed and would agree again. Khapah and her people were all she had. She would do anything he asked of her.

  But she didn’t always like it.

  Chapter 2

  Ossiphagan’s aboveground chambers were arranged in towers—the broken ribs of the monster lying on its back, half buried beneath the lava. Thin stone bridges stretched like sinew from the ribs to tunnels in the surrounding cliffs. The bridges looked natural, but they were too evenly and conveniently placed. Even Ama wasn’t sure how they had been formed.

  The bulk of the ruins lay beneath the surface in volcanic caves and carved–out tunnels. Engraved scenes decorated the walls like in the Marrow Chamber. Most of them were incomprehensible to the Shue. There were other tunnels like the Glass Hall, where a miniature city had been molded from crystal, then collapsed into ruins—or perhaps it had been designed that way. Still more tunnels ended in monstrous underground lavaflows, their former destinations lost forever.

  The Shue spent most of their days exploring the passageways for relics at the behest of Ama, Khapah, or both. They hung spare glowglobes in the tunnels they’d been to already. Many kilometers had been lit, but the Shue still had not found an end to the city.

  Luthiya made her way to the chantry, a large underground chamber in the skull of Ossiphagan’s Beast. The chantry was both beautiful and disturbing. Bizarre pillars exploded from the ground on all sides, looking more molded than carved. They twisted together at the ceiling like vines. Black tendrils of stone dripped from these woven arches, speckled with dead glowglobes. A lavafall marked the far end, giving the room an abyssal tinge. Rows of low, vaguely rectangular rock formations reminded Luthiya of benches in a chapel, which was how the chantry got its name.

  An array of ancient devices was laid out on the benches. Ama was out, probably on another of her expeditions deeper into the tunnels. She didn’t seem concerned that the Shue might steal from her. Maybe she trusted Khapah to control his people. Or maybe she watches these artifacts through other means.

  Luthiya walked down the rows between the benches, thinking of Khapah’s request. He hadn’t asked her to do anything wrong, but helping Khapah ultimately meant returning to Shuenha, to revenge and death. How would death heal them?

 
; She inspected the various relics in front of her. She’d tried a few of them before. Most of them did nothing, or what they did do was useless. Like the glass orb that spun multicolored spheres of light around your head. Or the ten–centimeter–square piece of hard synth, thinner than a hair, that didn’t bend or break no matter what you did to it. Ama might have a use for these oddities, but Khapah certainly didn’t.

  Luthiya picked up another artifact, a kind of flute. It looked like the bottom half had been eaten away, yet it still played a tune as beautiful as any svithan. Certain melodies had strange effects on living creatures—those that could hear, anyway. Ama would play a bright turn, causing salamanders to leap out of the lavafall. Even Luthiya had made the creatures do things when Ama wasn’t around. She put the flute down, deciding she’d tell Khapah about it eventually.

  She hesitated at the next two relics: tapered rods very similar to the one she’d given Khapah. She’d have to tell him about those, too.

  A copper sphere hovered above the rock near the end of the bench. Ama called it an urlimnion. It was her obsession. Fine metal shoots stemmed out from the sphere, turning at right angles to form concentric arcs. It was beautiful, though as far as Luthiya had seen it did nothing but float.

  She bit her lip. Should she tell Khapah about it anyway? She didn’t really know what it was. Ama only ever hinted at its use and probably didn’t know what it did either. Anyway, even if it were a weapon, Ama would never let Khapah have it. Telling him would only create tension.

  “Thiya!”

  Luthiya snatched her hand away from the urlimnion.

  Ama marched the length of the chantry, her robe swirling about her ankles. A collection of numenera objects clacked and jangled at her side, connected by a silver chain. I wonder if one of those told her I was in here.

  But Ama wasn’t angry. Her face was brighter than Luthiya had ever seen it. She even did a little twirl halfway through the room.

  Luthiya found herself smiling in return. “What’s going on?”

  Ama knelt in front of Luthiya, her robe fluttering to the ground. Luthiya was struck yet again by how beautiful this woman was, much more so than any of the Shue.