I.
The striated folds of the snowcapped range dipped down to the seething sea of masonry, that rose up at impracticable angles, as the tendrils of some enormous marine monstrosity. It appeared as if the grand planar fracture had been suffused by an invidious growth from the very bowels of the earth, a nascent, all conquering force, which even that ice mantled wilderness of unremitting carnage could not subdue. Over those black and snowless spires, gray clouds hung like curtains of petrified ash that no winged thing turned beneath.
The travelers stood the threshold of the sprawling ruin, three in number, and all garbed in hardy furlined gear. Cacilia craned her slender neck at the dark, convoluted spires with a child's wide eyed wonderment. Beside her, Bastian's tremendous swarthy bulk shivered with dread upon apprehending the scale of their prize. Cano alone remained undistracted and moved from his position at the fore of the troupe to examine the nearest of the arcing towers. His eyes gleamed feverishly out of his sharp pallid face and, lowering his woolen mask, he raised his voice strident above storm. “The Ruins of Rebirth. I told you it would be here. Just as Karto's incunabulum described.” Cacilia walked to the speaker and kissed him. A perfunctory gesture that left an ill impression in Cano's mind. Near soon as his annoyance arose, he swept it aside and secured his wiry arms about her tapered waist. The familiar warmth of her generous curves sent a thrill through his weary windchilled frame. She broke the kiss and he smiled and caressed her.
“I promised you a birthday gift, Hasilein.”
She looked away at his endearment. Little hare. A term he had bestowed on their first meeting nine years ago at the Urbrook Institute's garden terrace. She remembered with sadness, the stars sequestered in his eyes.
“You know what this means?”
He nodded, his typic analytical sternness returning. “Means we'll all get the kind of fame a man swiftly regrets.”
“I won't regret it. But see – to think structures of such sophistication could be so ancient! There's machinery – that lift there – that rivals our own technology! This will shake up our entire understanding of human development!” The woman tittered and spun, intoxicated with the granduer of the surroundings and the sweetness of her dreams.
Bastian sighed, crossed his powerful arms and smirked. “You weren't crazy after all.”
Cano looked triumphantly between his companions before seizing Cacilia and bearing her roughly to the ground behind a low compacted snowdrift as a crack resounded throughout the ravine. As Bastian's dark brow knitted in confusion, Cano loosed an austere command. “Get down! Behind the embankment!” The terror in the man's voice brooked no argument and Bastian flung himself behind the meager white tumulus as another retort assailed their ears. “What's going on?” Cacilia gasped. Cano's face was haggard and his breath came and went in ragged fits. He had been shot through the leg and painted the furrowed ground red. Cacilia screamed and covered her mouth. “Keep low, it'll be alright,” he managed through gritted teeth.
“Can you move?” Bastian asked, his voice tinged with rising panic.
Cano attemped to shift and cursed as needles of agony shot through his leaking limb. “Not well. You see him?” Bastian peeked over the albescent berm and spied a masked man holding a strange rifle of no standard make, in furs colorless as the snow. “I see the bastard.”
Cano removed his heavy backpack and withdrew a stack of dynamite, a lighter and a length of clay from within. From a belt sheath he withdrew a large hunting knife. He flung the insulated bag to Bastian and spoke as he hewed the fuse of one of the explosive sticks and molded planting clay about one end. “When I say, run to the southern snowdrift.”
“I take back what I said. You are crazy.”
“I need time to throw it. At this distance, its the only weapon we have.”
“I'll be shot.”
“Perhaps.” Cano winced and clutched at his damaged leg, still spilling to frosted ground. “He'll aim for your center mass. The pack is thick enough to stop a bullet. I'd carry it myself if I could.”
Cacilia wasn't listening to their plan. She shivered, with her arms wrapped about her knees and her back pressed against the frigid mound that blocked their nameless adversary's sight, her eyes darting from her lover's wound to an indeterminate point in space.
“Damn you.”
“I'm ready.”
“Damn you to hell.”
Cano focued on the weight of the explosive in his hand, raised the lighter to the fuse and waited. Bastian broke from cover and bolted to the adjacent drift some thirty feet to the south, raising the pack like a gladiator's shield over his exposed right flank. Cano pounded his wound, and, invigorated by the flooding pain, lit the dynamite, rose and spied the furclad hunstman before a deformed cliff, scantly visible due the flare of the sun. He squinted against starglare and lobbed the makeshift bomb with all his might as the sharpshooter fired. Bastian jerked backward in a puff of gelid detritus. Amid hearts' thrumming, the syncline that loomed over the triggerman exploded with a cataclysmal roar that shook the vale and disgorged a sheet of stone and ice. A polar viper set to swallow all. The sniper whirled and, realizing the doom that was upon him, loosed a desperate yell that rang near loud as the avalanche that buried him. The masked man's curse hung over the blizzard draped valley like a black cloud and beneath it, one of the explorers stirred.
“Bastian!”
“I'm alright. Can't say the same for your pack though.”
“Its fine.” Cano helped the big man to his feet and turned to Cacilia. She lay curled on the ground, hands over her head, shuddering, but not from cold.
“Get him?”
“I got him.”
“Leave him to the wolves.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, amusement darted across Cano's face. “There are no wolves here.”
“Except you.”
The extolment conflicted with the subtle astringence in the man's rough, tanned face. Cano furrowed his brow, shook the snow off his coat and helped the woman to her feet. He left her to Bastian's care and ventured to the wreckage he had made of the cliff face, leaving a sanguine track through the white. Throbbing pain subsided to a dull ache and he was glad of the cold. The huntsman had been well inhumed, for Cano could find no trace of him save mask and gun, which had been wrenched free of their owner by the landslide. He held the veil up, shaking it clear of snow and turned it in the light. It bore a visage vaguely human, projecting intensity without emotion. It was a likeness familiar to him, for it had been scribed in Karto's book. The mask of the harbinger. His eyes widened. In the mask's reflective surface he could see his companions entwined in a display of lurid passion. Cacilia's tongue slipped into Bastian's mouth, his hands closed upon her secluded flesh, hideous smiles distorted their faces. Panting white clouds, Cano spun and found the pair as he had left them. Cacilia drew deep calming breaths and muttered excitedly, her eyes fixed to the masonry, as if fearful of spying the gunner's corpse. Bastian knelt two paces distant, drained, and rummaged through the damaged pack. Cano returned his gaze, now marred with perplexity, to the artifact, but the reflection it afforded was blurred and indistinct, representing his compatriots as distant smuges of color against the deathly waste. He frowned, for it looked to be cheap metal. “Curious,” he muttered. He turned his attention to the weapon. It was a folding air gun of efficient construction and, like the mask, bore no marks indicative of provenance.
Once Cano's wound was treated, and inventory reparceled, he gave the gun to Bastian and put the mask in his own pack for further study. After a tense discussion, the trio agreed to continue the expedition, for they were too far from civilization to call for aid. Leaving the hunter to his icy tomb, they moved to the lift Cacilia had earlier indicated, which rested within the nearest of the hollowed spires. The terror that had formerly seized the company was replaced with a black mood and none spoke. Cano, limping and sucking air through his teeth, observed runes across the surface that enclosed the conveyance mechanism. He downed honeyed mead from a flask he kept in his pocket and poured over the pages of Karto's tome. He moved his leather gloved hands artfully about the smooth, curiously spongey material and it quivered and folded upon itself like watery origami. They passed within the chamber and discovered more of the sigils clustered upon a panel near the left side of the door. In a hushed voice, Cano translated the signs and read them aloud. “Seat of Sighting, Skylake of Sunder, Demense of Dreams, Cradle of Devouring, Concert of the Glass Colossus.”
“The book mentioned the Glass Colossus in several places,” Bastian commented in an attempt to hide his apprehension.
Cano dipped his head. “Yes, see here.” He pointed to a carving above the panel that displaced a throng guided by a masked figure with arms outstretched, and above it, a thinly and masterfully etched grapheme composed of a symmetrical curve, akin to a shallow U, vertically bisected by a single line, the endpoints of which spiraled outwards like the wake of a particle in a bubble chamber. “It matches the iconography in the book. The mask and sign of the harbinger.”
“Who was that man? The shooter.”
Both men turned to the woman, who had recovered her wits and was staring with constrained agitation at Cano.
“A guardian, I presume. The book mentions them briefly. Those annointed by the harbinger, who communes with the Glass Colossus. Its strange. It says it is forbidden for any to don the mask, save the harbinger, after undergoing the rite of rebirth, lest the wearer should kindle the wrath of the Colossus. Why would a guardian wear one?”
The woman's face was warped by some intense emotion Cano could not fathom. “You should have warned us.”
“What?”
“She's right.”
Cano, bearing a vexed countenance, spun to the bigger man.
“You're the only one who can read the damn thing, you should have said something.”
“How was I to know?” Cano thundered, cowing his detractors. He shook Karto's copy. “The orginal manuscript used to compile this is over a thousand years old. Would either of you have seriously expected any of the original inhabitants to still be here?” He lowered the book and ran a hand through his hair, biting back bitter words. When none spoke he shifted from foot to foot and attempted to put his hand on Cacilia's shoulder but she twisted from him and moved to Bastian's side, arms folded, face taunt. Bastian glared at the man. Cano sighed and turned from his scowling companions to the runic panel. Without assent, and in a fit of irritation, he activated the control for “Concert of the Glass Colossus,” and watched with awe as the black walls of the lift surged with geometrically spaced lines of white light. There came no sound and none within the vessel felt the force of motion. Whether they moved up or down, if at all, none could say. Seconds after the light appeared, it vanished and the door, if it could be called a door, spun away like a paper seashell.
“What did you do?” Cacilia demanded.
“Activated the lift. I figured, since-”
“The Concert is the room in which the prospective harbinger would undergo a ritual ordeal and make his ascent, we should begin our investigations there, as it forms the epicenter of the builders' mythos. Right?” Cacilia replied.
“You remember all that from my monograph, and yet still failed to recall my notes on the guardians.”
He regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth, for Cacilia frowned and turned up her head with unconcealed contempt. “Let's go.”
The trio debarked the device and stood a moment in shock, for before them stretched a caverous aperture, so high its apex was lost to distance.
“Its not possible. This structure is larger than the entire ruin,” Cacilia sputtered.
“I feel like I'm hallucinating,” Bastian said with a wary glance to what he believed to be up.
Cano basked in the vista and smiled. “Marvelous.”
“What about guardians, there might be more?” Cacilia asked with a shudder.
Cano turned to her, removed his knife from his belt, his visage grave, determined. “If there are, we'll be ready for them.” Bastian brandished his incessant smirk and adjusted the masked man's armament.
The group wandered for hours through the gargantuan corridor, surveying strange spheres of light that speckled the air like jailed comets, fuchsia crystals that carpeted the ground as a creeping frost, and vaulted spines of the walls which curved as the ribcage of some fathomless fossilized beast. Cano paused as Cacilia and Bastian conferred among themselves. He felt cold, colder than he had been on his side in the bloody snow, yet sweat poured thickly from his pale flesh. The perspiration did not drop, but rose and drifted toward the ceiling. Cano whirled to his comrades and noticed they too looked as if they had just finished a marathon. They studied each other, mesmerized as their residue trickled heavenward. He felt something warm climbing his leg and looked down to behold the blood from his wound soaking up to his thigh, as if he had been hanging by his ankles. All were too stunned to speak. When they shifted to continue their ingress, they discovered the hall had compressed, and beheld its terminus upon which resided a mechanism composed of interlocking irridescent metal juts that gave the impression of teeth. In the middle of the mawlike securance, even with Cano's chest, was an orrery. For a moment the group studied the device. Bastian and Cacilia at a loss. “What is it?” The big man asked. “A door,” Cano replied softly, his eyes to the intricate miniature. He gave a hum of excitement. The planets were misaligned. With steady hands he reached into the vortex of fanged metal and reordered the celestial spheres so all were in their proper orbits. There came then a low rumble like the distant arousal of an enormous engine and the toothy metal retracted, leaving a smooth square passage around either side of the planetary model, which slowly folded up into the ceiling.
Cano tightened his grip on the knife and forded the threshold, Bastian and Cacilia close behind.
The now toothless portal was filled with statues of masked figures, male and female, and let out to a circular chamber, the walls of which were covered in fractured reflective material. On the floor in the center of the room was etched an outline of the sign of the harbinger. For a long moment, they stared with dread at the entrancing glyph before casting the nets of their eyes to their manifold replications.
Cano took off his pack, removed the mask, set it on top of its previous container and withdrew Karto's tome. He flipped carefully through the pages until he landed on the drawing which matched the iconography of the floor.
“Even if the man who attacked us was a harbinger, why wear the mask while patrolling? Its ceremonial,” He muttered.
“Traditions change,” Bastian offered halfheartedly.
“Faster than the properties of alloys.”
“What do you mean?” Cacilia asked as she turned from the faceted wall. Her reflection did not turn with her. Cano blinked, believing it, like the vision in the mask, to be a passing mental deformity wrought by the day's grim adventure and the curious ambiance of the ruin. He cleared his throat and continued.
“I mean of all the pieces of headgear to wear in freezing weather, a largely metal mask is one of the last a sane man would pick. Especially if you were planning on shooting trespassers. Cuts off peripheral vision. Reflects the sun. The glare on it was the only reason I was able to see him before he fired. His dress makes no sense regardless of whether he was or wasn't a member of the sect the book describes.”
“He was insane.”
“Then why position himself so the sun was to his back?”
“Momentary bout of lucidity,” Cacilia answered confidently.
Cano worked his jaw with furrowed brow. “Doubtful.” He looked from the text and examined the walls of the chamber, shut his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them he started. The reflections were wrong. The clear crystalline surfaces showed only where Cano had been, and where, he induced, he could be. His movements and their counterparts in the glass were out of synch, ever dilating. “Do you see that?”
“What?” Bastian asked nonchalantly, peering around with a sure grip on his gun. Cacilia followed Cano's gaze but discerned nothing.
Darkness fell and every shimmering surface was swept clear by the stygian tide save for one, and in its depths, Cano saw himself on a familiar garden terrace beneath a starlit sky, Cacilia at his elbow in lilac dress, a cheerful crowd at their backs. The image faded and was replaced with Bastian and Cacilia's unclad bodies, twined in passionate embrace. Their lust labored laughter rang like the instrument of some mad god in his brain. Just as he prepared to turn away, another image sprang from the all-swallowing black, Bastian handing a sallow faced man in white furs a bundle of cash, a mask beside the money. The mask of the harbinger. More scenes unfurled until, once more, the entire curving wall was relit, luminous against the murk like so many stars. He saw, heard, scented and felt Bastian's hand upon Cacilia's stomach and the pulse of two hearts, a kick. The signing of divorce papers. The cheers of his professional peers as celebrants amid a wedding. Bastian and Cacilia uttering marriage vows. His own birth. A conspiratorial whisper from the woman he loved. “We need to get him out of our lives.” In disorder, the images proceeded and regressed with such rapidity that Cano could no longer see anything but blurred blue light, and from it, a voice calm as a brook and overwhelming as a raging sea. Cano ground his teeth and closed his eyes, his hands pressed to his head, over his ears, with such violence he tore his own hair, his body shaking as if electrified.
Cacilia's high voice fell upon him as a saber. “What's wrong?”
Cano opened his eyes and lowered his hands. Strands of hair fell from his fingers. He did not turn or speak, but stared at the adjacent glassy contour, still as statuary. Gone, the nettled hope that raked his eyes. He laughed without mirth and spoke without turning, voice and countenance betraying no emotion. “You did it all quite cleverly.”
“What are you talking about?” Cacilia moved toward the speaker as Bastian looked on with growing concern.
For several seconds Cano gave no reply and stood as before, his eyes to the mirrored wall. Then he began to sing a poem Cacilia knew well. “Where the slanting forest eaves, shingled tight with greenest leaves, sweep the scented meadow-sedge, let us snoop along the edge; let us pry in hidden nooks, laden with our nature books, scaring birds with happy cries,” He turned to the woman and so hateful was his countenance, she shrank before him. “Cloroforming butterflies.” Without warning, he seized her and held his knife to her throat. Bastian's jaw distended and his bulk quivered with frightful indecision.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Why don't you tell him, Cacilia. Or shall I?”
“Hey, easy,” Bastian said, raising his free hand in entreaty. “Why don't you just drop the knife and we can talk about it?”
“We are talking. Since my darling pet seems ill inclined to speak, why don't you do the honors?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you were the one who hired the man who attacked us. And that it was this pitiful creature's idea.”
“Why would I do that? Why would she?”
“You both get what you want, my money, bequeathed to my wife upon my death, and full credit for the discovery of,” His luminous eyes swept over the vast interior. Bastian wasn't sure whether Cano's words were coming from the mirrors or his mouth.
“You've gone mad.”
“An innocent man proclaims his innocence. A guilty man deflects.” He pressed the blade against the woman's skin until she shrieked and a thin line of blood trickled down her shirt.
“Stop it!”
“Then confess.” He drew the blade up and down her neck like a practiced barber whittling missed hairs and pulled her hair with his free hand, prompting another strangled cry from her contorted lips.
“Goddamnit! Let her go!”
Cano tilted his head like a riled bird. “Why, so you can shoot me?” Bastian tightened his grip on the air gun. “Ok.” Cano smiled and released Cacilia. She flopped to her knees and scuttled to the gunman. She put one hand to the nick at her throat and loosed a hoarse and malignant cry. “Shoot him, Bastian! Do it now!” Bastian raised the deadly air gun and wavered. Cano stood with his arms outstretched, the knife gleaming malevolently in his crimson gloved hand, his face twisted by a mocking expression. “He knows, you fool. Do it! Do it now!”
“He can't do it anymore than you can look me in the eye.”
“Shut up!”
Bastian's hands trembled, his face distorted by despair.
“Coward.” Cacilia wretched the gun from Bastian's hands, swuning it wildly toward Cano, and fired. The blast rattled the room and Bastian sank away from the barrel. Cano looked down at the hole in his abdomen and watched his blood splatter to the floor. “I thought it would go up.” The knife slipped from his grasp and clattered to the ground. Two more retorts in succession sent him reeling back into the mirrorwall, but rather than collide with it, he fell through it, the surface rippling like argent liquid. Cacilia inhaled deeply and lowered the weapon. Bastian looked on, stunned, unable to wring words from his coiling mind. The surface of the mirror wall into which the man had tumbled retained three sanguine holes from which thin cracks spiderwebbed. After several moments of stillness, Bastian managed a hoarse whisper.
“What happened?”
Cacilia's mouth opened and closed like a beached guppy. “I don't know.”
The cracks grew larger.
“He said that anyone who dons the mask-”
“I know what he said.”
“Then-”
“Quiet!”
“We need to leave!”
Before she could respond, the bloodstained floor glowed and the light spread throughout the dread seal. The room quaked as the sigil's incandescence grew beneath the feet of the remaining explorers. Cacilia snatched Karto's tome from the floor as a horrid voice resounded. The crevices sealed up, as if time had been reversed. Cacilia froze and spied herself in the duplicatory surface, rotting, her chest hollowed by worms. Bastian retched and fell to a knee. The fissures vanished completely and the malefactors beheld the body of Cano tilting a starless void, blood trailing like red tentacles, and something incomprehensible writhing in the sabled distance. As the vague and horrible impression drew forth from the abyssal reach, Cano opened his eyes. Stark against caliginous roil and dreadful were those piercing orbs, and the bloodless face from which they burned, and in their lenses, dead stars furled.
With miserable cries, the conspirators fled the chamber of execution, into the statuary passage, and the fanged walls closed swift upon them, as if the structure sought to devour them whole. They flung themselves through the threshold as the metal spines shut tight and tore to the surface without a backward glance.
II.
The Ur-Brook Institute resounded with gaity. The learned faces of the Eisenwald Society For The Study Of Antiquities, leaned over their fillet filled platters and bubbling wine glasses as Bastian Marat took the stage. Despite the poundage and gray he had incurred since the expedition, he cut an impressive figure in black suit and tie and spoke with the suave, commanding tones and practiced gesticulation of the seasoned politician. “In closing, I'd like to offer a few words of thanks, first to the Eisenwald Society.” He raised his glass and the audience followed suit. “Without whose support, the excavations would never have taken place, and second, to my dear wife.” He gestured with his goblet to a bejeweled woman seated alone in the front row, her long dark tresses bundled and her delicate features poised like some regent of yore. “Cacilia Talwar, without whom, none of this would be possible.” The banquet hall erupted in applause. Cacilia beamed. There broke a coarse and spirit soused voice from the crowd. “And to Cano Lef, may we not forget his sacrifice!” Bastian swallowed and with difficulty replied, “May god keep him.” He recognized the drunken intruder as Professor Eustice Eisenwald, grandson of Mercruxious Eisenwald, the illustrious fraternity's founder. Cacilia turned her swanish head to Eustice, her gaudied features tetanic with disdain. He took no notice of the woman's scorn, sprang to his feet and encouraged a toast to the late Mr. Lef. “He was not the warmest sort, as many of you will recall, and we had our quarrels, damned viscious they were, and ever the worse I came away from them!” This leavened the mood and brought a twinge of mirth to the somber crowd. “Because he was a brillant man. As anyone who has read his Prehuman Stone Tool Industries & The Future Of Man can attest. Solid too. Solid as those stones he found so fascinating. Ever a port in our stormy sea. But above all, he had within him that quality which seperates the serious scholar from the dabbler – an unwavering tenacity. To Cano!” The majority raised their glasses high and echoed Eustice's words, while those detatched and frivolous few who remained unmoved by the oration murmured tepidly and tipped golden liquid into their gullets. Bastion's white knuckles trembled upon the pulpit. With all eyes on Eustice, he made to leave the stage, but spied a server bearing a large silver platter under his arm, and in the mirrored surface lurked Cano's thin, impassive face. Bastian went white with dread and his goblet fell from his hand. Every head turned to the sound of broken glass. Bastian stood dumbly, blanched, his jaw working rapidly in involuntary contractions, his eyes to the shimmering flatware, which no longer contained, in its reflection, any trace of his old companion. “It would seem my husband has had a bit too much to drink.” The expressions of concern which had colored the faces of the crowd, were quick replaced with amusement. Laughter wildfired and Bastian, seizing the moment to extricate himself from embarrassment, joined in the merriment. When he finally managed to flee the stage Cacilia rushed up to him in a state of venomous consternation.
“What the hell was that?”
“I saw him.”
“I'm not having these discussions again.”
“I tell you, I saw him, plain as I see you now. Staring out at me from the metal.”
“Listen to yourself!”
Bastian turned from her and pressed his palm to his brow, as if attempting to dislodge the malaise which preyed upon his mind. Behind the couple, a stewardess moved to the stage and swept crystalline shards into a dustpan, revealing the red ruin beneath. From the dais, the voice of Eustace's pupil, Evandra Fyr, reverberated, high and sonorous. She offered appreciation to the august gathering and launched, with enthusiasm, into a narrative concerning her studies into ancient tool making. “I was deeply moved by the work of Agatha Sydel and our own Cano Lef, who you have all so admirably honored.” Cacilia took her husband by the arm and drew him from the banquet hall.
Morose and withdrawn, he allowed himself to be led to their manor next to the campus as a drizzle misted the world. Cacilia passed into the bathroom, and Bastian lounged despondantly in the drawing room, with a towel about his shoulders, drying his hair and staring out the window as a storm swept in and covered the land in furious swatches of blue and black. Welkin's deluge beat the large singular pane of the window and the trees beyond it shook with such violence they appeared as if they might come unrooted. He passed a quivering hand over his brow, matting his hair, and withdrew a bottle of pills. The doctor had told him to take two per episode. He took three and chased them with cognac. A crack appeared on the window. He leapt to his feet and trudged toward the sound, thinking it a broken branch flung by the gale. The deformation was round and seemed to have come from within the room. Two more fissures followed. From the three gouges, three objects tumbled to the floor.
When Cacilia returned to the drawing room she found her husband motionless at the sill, muttering to himself. “Let us pry in hidden nooks, laden with our nature books, scaring birds with happy cries, cloroforming butterflies.” She stilled. He rolled three motes of metal in hand. “What is that?” Bastian met her gaze and spoke in a voice not his own. “A gift returned, Hasilein.”