The Barsoom Project dp-2 Read online

  She nodded, and a twitch at the corners of her lips told Max that his brother, as usual, had been dead on the money. There was a swift babble of requests as the rest of them followed suit, and then swift multiple fires as the sacred cylinders were lit all around.

  Max braced himself for the worst, and sucked smoke. He was surprised. For unfiltered, hand-rolled cigarettes, these were, mild, almost like smoking air. But luminous smoke poured from his mouth and nose as he exhaled, and his harpoon began to glow.

  Ahead of him, Snow Goose stopped, exhaling smoke against an unyielding wall.

  Hebert joined her, blew hard against it, then slapped at it with the pink palm of his hand. “What’s the matter?”

  “The ice’s been protected against magic.” She said it in one of those matter-of-fact voices that made you ashamed to have asked such a stupid question.

  “How do we get through it?”

  “We can’t stop here. The way to Sedna lies beyond the underworld.” Snow Goose frowned. “Where magic fails, perhaps muscle…”

  The face of the ice sheet measured eight feet across. Behind it, something flickered dimly, a vague, sluggish movement. Max had the impression of something monstrously tall that moved with unnatural vitality. It seemed to be balancing on one leg.

  Then the shadow was gone, and the skin on the back of his neck ceased to creep.

  “ Karate Kid,” Kevin said. “Part Seventeen.”

  Exactly,” Snow Goose said softly. “Let’s put our backs to it.”

  Max set his cheek against the ice. Orson and Trianna joined him; both flinched from the cold. “Go,” said Orson, and they heaved. The ice might have moved a tenth of an inch.

  Charlene moved between Orson and Max. Heave. Nothing.

  She and Orson shared a ragged smile. “What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?” she gasped.

  “My brother said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Heave,” Max said, and they heaved. The ice wall might have shifted, or not. “Rest. Let it settle. Heave!”

  Kevin consulted his pocket computer, then politely moved Charlene and Orson aside. “I’ve got soot!” he chirped. “And Max has an owl claw. That makes us the strongest ones here!” He leaned against the ice and strained mightily.

  There was no more conversation, just the sound of fevered breathing in a confined space, as the largest and smallest of the Gamers bent their backs against eight feet of ice.

  With a long brittle note, the first fissure appeared in the wall. As it deepened, a vast network of tiny cracks turned the entire sheet milky.

  Max stepped back. He heaved for breath and said, “Hulk smash!” and ran at the wall.

  The thud must have been audible in Gaming A. There was a moment in which nothing happened, and then the entire barrier shattered, almost in slow motion. Max lurched through a couple of steps, skidding on shards, before he could stop.

  Kevin flexed his arm and made a tiny biceps, face positively luminous.

  The air was gray with a dense mist that flowed like an angry ocean, churned in the cavernous opening like cold smoke. Every sound they made, every footstep or whisper, reverberated like a sneeze in a tomb. The mist chilled Max to the bone. It was a sticky cold. The furs and thermal-reflective lining of his jacket seemed helpless against it.

  His mind noted, trying to make sensible shapes out of that roiling fog. It formed and re-formed itself into grotesque illusions, shadows cast by impossible shapes: a suggestion of tremendous jaws, a sudden glimpse of a hundred pairs of eyes, the bones of a hand brushing across his face. As the other Adventurers pushed through behind him, he felt their unease as an extension of his own.

  “Welcome to Hell,” he said quietly, helping Trianna past a stack of ice chips. She looked pained.

  Without any stated intention, the group formed a circle, standing close enough to touch shoulders. One could not see the size of it, but the moving rivers of fog, the echoes, all told of a cavern as big as the world.

  Max felt the urge to scream, to do something to fill the horrid emptiness around him. He felt utterly cowed.

  “It must be your decision to go ahead,” Snow Goose said. “I don’t know how much protection I can offer you.”

  Yarnall peered out into the mist. Somewhere on the other side of that shifting veil, a vibration sounded. It might have been something natural-the sound of the earth shifting, perhaps, or the cry of an animal. If it was an animal, it was a maddened one, and the hair on Max’s arms stood up and tingled. “We’ve gotta go,” the National Guardsman said. “Listen. There’s something out there. We can’t go back-the sun is dying, and so will we. We can’t stay where we are. The Cabal will just send something to get us.”

  Frankish Oliver’s club raised in agreement. “Let’s meet it head-on.”

  Snow Goose nodded approvingly. “We will sing songs for the spirits of those who die.”

  Unless we all buy it,” Orson reminded her.

  “A rainbow of light and happiness, you are.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE PAIJA

  The fog swallowed them. Snow Goose seemed sure of her directions. There was rarely a choice. They followed ridges and smooth rock, the path of least resistance. Where the path forked, Max glimpsed smoke drifting from Snow Goose’s mouth.

  Now they were crossing a land bridge so high up that the floor vanished into the mist, and only giant stalagmites rising up like mountains through the clouds told them there was any floor at all. They trooped single file, and Max found himself behind Charlene. She was limping. A glimpse of her profile showed excitement and anticipation and a certain sadness.

  “Charlene?”

  She half-turned with that oddly angular grace: she reminded him of a praying mantis. She was breathing too hard, trying to disguise it behind a game smile.

  “Do you miss your friend? Eviane?”

  Charlene sighed. As tall as she was, she was losing inches, drooping. Gravity was pulling her down. Brother Orson hung back to listen to the conversation.

  “We’re friends, but… we’d barely met,” she said wistfully.

  “How’s that?” Orson asked.

  “We met on the Gaming channels. For maybe a year we’ve been playing everything we could get into, and she kept telling me about Dream Park. I’d heard of it. She said that I had to come. Tell the truth, I wasn’t all that hot on it. I thought one of the Cook Islands, or maybe Greece. But I wanted to meet Eviane.” She paused. “I don’t have that many friends. So I came, and before I could blink, Eviane was killed.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair, does it? How’s your leg?”

  She smiled ruefully. “I thought I was hiding that. I can walk it out.”

  Orson noticeably straightened up. “If you need help carrying anything, let me know.”

  Her long face softened and her eyes shone gratefully.

  The bridge narrowed up ahead, and now walking single file became more critical.

  Max knew he shouldn’t look down, but his eyes wouldn’t obey. Down there in the frozen, crawling wastes, something lived, something watched. He knew it. Maybe not alive. Maybe dead and damned…

  From up ahead came a repetition of the roaring, piercing bass note. Quake! The entire cave shook with it. Max dropped to his belly, set his cheek against the stone of the natural bridge, and waited. He saw Johnny Welsh lose his balance, drop to his hands and knees, and roll toward the edge anyway.

  Trianna caught him with one arm, helped him, shaking, to his feet. “I’m always falling for blondes,” he said.

  The mist thickened and thinned in pulses. The tremors had not quite died. Yarnall, taking an unsteady lead, kept peeking back over his shoulder as if the bunch of them might rabbit at any moment. The bridge now measured barely two feet across. Beneath gaped infinity.

  If you focused your eyes carefully into the depths, the mists occasionally parted, and the cavern stretched away into endless night. It seemed to Max that he could see stars down there, but it might ha
ve been the reflection of strange light on ice crystals. He shivered.

  Step by careful step, they crossed that bridge. Those two feet of path began to feel like a tightrope. Snow Goose stopped them. “Wait. Stop now, and find your breathing.”

  “What?” Bowles said cautiously.

  “Your breathing.” She placed her hands about an inch below her navel. “Breathe down to here, to the center of your body. You will find the balance you will need.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Orson complained. “Center of my body?”

  “Ignore the flesh,” she insisted. “Feel your way to the center. Steady your breathing and visualize, or you will not survive.”

  “What I visualize,” Orson whimpered, “is getting chucked off this bridge, and controlling my breathing all the way to the bottom.”

  The wind keened, sighed mockingly. Despite his uneasy balance, and the strangeness, and the fear he felt here on the edge of infinity, Max searched within himself, struggled to see something beneath the layers of clothing, the muscle,

  (the fat) the organs and tissues,

  (the fat) and down to the bones themselves, saw himself as a skeleton, standing on a two-foot bridge over the very pit of Hell, that damned wind whistling hollow through his bones.

  When he found that place, curiously, he felt warmer, more relaxed. When he opened his eyes, there was less fear.

  Her next words touched his ears as from across a gulf. “Now keep your breathing constant and smooth, and follow me.”

  Max chose his steps with care. Once he stumbled, wavered, lost his balance, but his toe found purchase where there should have been only air.

  (He reached his toe out again to test the “air” beyond the strip of bridge. He found solidity, but it was invisible. He decided not to trust it… but he felt better.)

  The path began to widen. The group had just heaved a collective sigh of relief when Another terrible scream of rage.

  Close, and from no discernible direction. Yarnall moved more quickly, trying to get them onto the widened path. It was almost six feet across here, and they began to walk in twos, Yarnall and Kevin in the front, war clubs facing off against the unknown. Kevin clutched at the bag around his neck, as if milking it for strength.

  Behind him were Orson and Snow Goose, and behind them Max and Charlene.

  The mist congealed and cleared again and showed him unreality, illusion. Max tried to blink it away:

  It stood twenty feet tall. He would have called it a woman, because of the pendulous breasts only partially concealed by an eight-foot cascade of flowing black hair. But the face was a demon’s face, wild and inhuman, with brown teeth like chisels and eyes that closed to slits. With each breath, the entire wrinkled face expanded and contracted. Her arms, muscular and wide-spread, were tipped with evil hooked nails longer than the head of Max’s spear.

  That wasn’t the worst. Not by a bunch. The creature had only one leg, and that leg came from, well, from the genitalia.

  “What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up his backside?” Johnny asked quietly.

  That thick, obscene leg flexed, and the creature stretched down. Hooked nails curled around a misted stalagmite. A quick convulsion of python muscles, and the great chunk of rock snapped off in its hand, a ten-foot limestone club that coruscated in the darkness like a wet fuse.

  Snow Goose backed them up. “Paija!” she said urgently. “We’ve gotta go back to where the path is too narrow for her to follow, and get ready.”

  “No argument here,” Max heard Yarnall mutter.

  They backed up along the path. The Paija hissed venomously at them, Cerberus at the gates of Hades.

  “Your amulets!” she cried.

  Where did I put that? Max rooted around in his bag until he found his gift from Martin the Arctic Fox, an owl’s claw petrified almost into a knot. Snow Goose took it. She took Kevin’s leather pouch and poured a thin stream of black powder into the palm of her hand. Her round face crinkled happily. “Strength! Soot is stronger than fire.”

  “I should be carrying Ajax cleanser,” Johnny Welsh said. “Stronger than soot.”

  Trianna rubbed his shoulder. “Your bird worked when we needed it, Johnny.”

  He abandoned his scowl and gave her a quick hug.

  Each Adventurer made his contribution in turn, and the little pile grew. The woman-demon grew tired of waiting. She hopped a step closer along the stone bridge. The bridge groaned in distress.

  “Hurry!” Snow Goose bit her lip, thinking quickly. “You spoke of the fiber in your backpacks. You said it had power, perhaps more power than the amulets. Quickly, take them off, stack them in a pile.”

  Yarnall, Hebert, and Ollie shucked their backpacks and complied. They kept worried eyes on the she-thing and flapped their arms for balance, but moved as quickly as possible.

  “The suspense is killing me,” Kevin said to Johnny as they shucked backpacks. “What do you call someone with no arms and no legs, with a wooden stick up the backside?”

  “Pop.”

  “Groan.”

  Hippogryph added his backpack to the pile.

  “What is that creature?” Bowles asked.

  “Good question,” Max said ruminatively. “Looks like something out of ‘Saucer Sluts Meet Hercules.”

  Bowles looked pained. “Please. I was a child. When I signed the contracts they called it ‘Space Maidens on Olympus.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Shh,” Snow Goose said urgently. “It’s called a Paija. It’s a demon, but the Cabal must have brought it here to guard the entrance. This isn’t good.”

  Max whispered, “Why would it be?”

  “Heh. Yes. But they must have more power than Daddy thought. Hurry.”

  She took a leather thong from around her neck, pulled a tiny goose-doll out of her cleavage. She looked around at the others. “Ahh

  … Johnny, we don’t want to deplete your charm. Let’s see. Oliver. Frankish Oliver.” Ollie stepped forward, and she opened the bundle that he wore around his neck, and sighed with relief. “Good. You also have a winged Inua. We can lead.” She hunkered down. “Now, the rest of you. All of you have spirit selves. All of you have both flesh and a spirit form. The fleshly form is not strong enough. But perhaps our spirit forms could prevail, If we can trick it, then its magic, its life force, will be ours to command.”

  She took her totem, and Oliver’s, a hawk carved from some hard black substance. “I need string, and I need something that was part of a satellite,” she said.

  Charlene handed her a pair of gloves. “Put these on.”

  “No, it’s for-”

  “Put them on, Snow Goose.”

  The Inuit maiden shrugged with her eyebrows and pulled the thin gloves over her hands. Delicately, Charlene handed her a spool of thread. “Falling Angel cable. The gloves are made of it too. You don’t want to touch the cable with anything but the gloves.”

  She nodded. She wrapped the two totems together with the thread, then looped the spool into the bundle as well. “We need a song,” she said. “A sacred song.”

  “We don’t know any,” Max protested.

  “No-one of yours will do. Weren’t you singing one earlier that spoke of our land? We must pull our worlds closer together.”

  Orson groaned. “Kevin?”

  Smiling and buck-toothed, Kevin strode forward. “Let me see… ”

  Orson covered his ears as Kevin elaborated on his previous theme, picking up the adventures of Eskimo Nell, Dead-Eye Dick, and Mexican Pete in the midst of the most grueling contest in the annals of song.

  Snow Goose was all business, chanting happily over her little bundle. The group chimed along with Kevin as the Ballad of Eskimo Nell progressed to its glorious climax.

  “Now!” Snow Goose said. Her eyes rolled up, her lips moved, Dah dee dah dee dah diddity dee- “Inua of my Ancestors! We fight to keep your rite. Inua of my Ancestors, be at our side t
his night. O Children of the freezing air, come live within me now. Air spirits come, and join in war to shatter Ahk-lut’s dream, ally with us against an evil folk who would blaspheme. Set us free of heavy flesh, set us free from our illusions, set us FREE!”

  The air was humming. The bridge beneath their feet vibrated like a plucked guitar string. Max could feel it in his teeth, in his fillings. (Dammit, that hurt! The feeling was like the little chill he’d had on the airplane — what seemed a lifetime ago, but now deeper and stronger, and ouch!)

  Snow Goose joined hands with Frankish Oliver. He seemed nervous at first, trying to twist his hand out of her grip, but she held on as the vibration grew stronger and stronger. At last the sound was recognizable as human voices, stripped of euphonics and amplified staggeringly. It was a chant, a ritual chant that was all undertones, a sound like a row of giant gongs ringing beneath three feet of oil.

  Snow Goose’s outline was the first to change, followed swiftly by Frankish Oliver’s. They became like fluid metal, running together, peeling apart, and the light expanded until it surrounded the other Gamers as well, bathing them all in a silvery, gloriously fluxing incandescence.

  At first Max saw only a blurred glow. It moved, shifted, and he understood: something intangible was pulling itself free from Max. A moment later he could see its shape.

  It was himself, in a way. Once, after a debilitating stretch of fever, he had lost enough weight in his face to see the cheekbones that shaped it, and he recognized them now. But that perfect, idyllic shape turned and gave him a nod, smiling as if they shared some great secret. Max couldn’t hear the undertone chanting anymore-it was more like he was a part of it, his body one of the notes. He turned to the other Gamers, and was astonished. From each of them flowed an ectomorphic form, more beautiful than anything they could have aspired to in life. The forms rose above them, hovered there, then joined hands in a circle.

  Max stared, trying to absorb what he was seeing. The cave, once the very heart of darkness, glowed with a light which was not of man, or of man’s doing. It was a holy light, a miniature aurora borealis, a light which flowed from within the floating, flaming figures.