The Triumvirate (The Hollower Trilogy) Read online

  Ian helped Lauren and Mendez helped Anita as they followed Erik toward the rocky valley where he and Mendez had made their way back to the courtyard. They needed to rest, to regroup someplace where nothing could hurt them. So far, the valley, even with its ever-present threat of falling rock, was still the safest and most reliable place they had been in that world.

  Ian helped Lauren onto a nearby flat rock and sat down next to her. Anita and Mendez sank onto an adjacent rock, and Erik leaned against another. For a long time, no one spoke. Finally, Erik said, “I’m sorry.”

  The rest of them looked at him.

  “For what?” Mendez asked.

  “For...not being Dave. Not being able to keep us together, or get us out of this mess. I’m sorry. I just...I don’t know what to do next.”

  He noticed others exchanging glances of sympathy. Anita got up and came over to him, putting her thin arm around his shoulders. “Listen, sugar,” she said, “you have always been willing to do whatever it took to protect the people you love. You’ve risked your life for others, and you’ve survived something that has the kind of odds of being in not one, but three plane crashes. And you’ve come out okay. We’ve all come out okay. This situation is nothing like any experience any of us has ever had, and there’s no way to prepare for it. We’re holding on and doing what we can to survive and get home. No one—not even Dave—could do more.”

  The others nodded in agreement and offered their own affirmatives. Anita went on. “I’ll tell you what I told Dave, when all was said and done. I told him that from time to time, we accept roles as caretakers of others. Sometimes as a parent, a spouse, a sibling, whatever that role is, we feel it’s our responsibility to take care of someone else. But there aren’t any guidelines to it. You do the best you can. That’s all anyone in your care, to whatever degree, can possibly ask of you.”

  “Erik,” Lauren added, “we’re all still here. In fact, we found Mrs. Mendez, so I’d say we’re ahead of the game.”

  Anita smiled. “See, you found me. Mission accomplished.” She winked at her husband and returned to the rock next to him.

  Erik smiled a little at her. “Highlight of my day.”

  “Look, man, we’ve got your back. We’re going home. You told me that.”

  Erik ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “We still have to find a way out of here.”

  “We could try that way.” Ian gestured at a rock pathway leading in a different direction from where Erik and Mendez had come. This path looked deliberate, the stone arch along its length overhead even and smooth. At the far end, a couple hundred feet down, Erik could just make out some kind of stone block or pillar.

  “Why that way?” Mendez asked.

  “Because I think...I think that might be a door.”

  The others rose to look, and Erik thought the kid might be right. It could be a door down there; that was as viable an option as anything else here. There were no guidelines, as Anita had said. They’d just have to go on instinct. They’d just have to...well, trust themselves, he supposed.

  “Let’s try it,” he said, and he and Ian led the way down the path.

  The pathway opened to a small courtyard of bleached stone. A white stone ring stood upright, framing a thin rectangular stone slab. Two larger vaults lay on the ground, any writing having long worn away to indecipherable grooves. Erik moved around the vaults, ran a hand along the edge of the ring, and looked behind the slab. If it was a door, it didn’t seem to go anywhere. If it had to be activated somehow, the mechanism was hidden.

  Mendez voiced the thought on Erik’s mind. “So how do we make it work?”

  “Not sure,” Ian said, unperturbed. He examined the ring, searching its flat surface carefully. He ran a hand over the slab they had taken to be a door. Then he turned to the vaults. Brushing some red dust off the surface of one, he said, “I think....” He blinked, rubbing his eyes. “I think this is the same kind of writing as what Lauren and I found back in one of those pyramids. It...see, it changes. It’s like it automatically translates for the species reading it. Although, given that it’s ancient Aramaic, my guess is that whoever developed this kind of Rosetta Stone-like feature of writing did it back, well...before the Rosetta Stone. Still, I think I can make some of it out....”

  The others crowded around him.

  “What are you, some kind of linguist?” Mendez asked.

  Ian flushed red. “I...yes, I suppose you could say that. My mother—well, when she was sane...and you know, still alive—she taught me ancient languages. I had an ear for them, so that’s what I went to school for.”

  “I think it’s really cool,” Lauren said, and squeezed his arm. He smiled at her.

  “Actually,” Mendez said, “that is pretty impressive. And very lucky—for all of us. What does this say?”

  “Well,” Ian said, running a finger in the grooves to try to clear them of further dust. “This part’s nearly all worn away. This...is something about gods...something about the ancient Ones Without Names, who amuse themselves with the chaosium of galaxies, who existed before time and who created universes from the voids. Not much help there.... And this part’s too faded.” His finger traced down a few lines, then he skipped to the next vault. A line or two down, he continued. “This talks about... uh...the end. Of these people. They saw it coming. They knew the soul-eaters had come with pieces of their dying world inside them. The soul-eaters brought...others. In the end, they brought others with them and... oh God.”

  “What does it say?” Lauren touched his arm.

  “They tried to open up their own rip...at least, I think that’s what they mean. They call it a mouth of worlds right here....” He pointed as he looked up at them, judged from their expressions that they had no idea what he was pointing at, and went back to translating. “They tried to open up a rip to the Hollowers’ home world. The Triumvirate—here they call them a...like, a committee, a triumvirate—found out beforehand and brought the...can’t read that but it looks from the sentence after like the Hollowers brought in gods from other universes. Fierce predator gods.”

  “Does it say how they did it?” Erik asked. “I mean, how these people or whatever they were opened up a rip to the Hollowers’ own dimension?”

  Ian scanned the faded carvings for a moment and said, “Only contextually. It looks like they made some kind of artifact, but had no time to activate it. The Hollowers and these predator gods got to them first, and the artifact was...sent away. Not sure what that means. It ends here with this inscription: ‘We are echoes in the wind. Our last words are scars on the skin of time.’ It looks like after that, there are symbols. Designs, maybe. Nothing I can identify as words.”

  The others were quiet for a time. Lauren broke the silence with a little choked sob. “They wiped out an entire race. They destroyed...oh God.” Ian put his arm around her and hugged her. They looked to Erik like survivors of a terrible war, their clothes ripped and bloody, their faces smudged with red dirt.

  “So...this artifact, this thing they used to open the rip. It was...sent away?” Mendez eyed the ring and the slab.

  “My guess,” Ian said, “would be they sent it someplace the Hollowers wouldn’t find it.”

  “I’m a little surprised the Hollowers haven’t tried to come down on this party. Why would they let us find—or even send us to a dimension where we could find—suggestions on how to defeat them?”

  The others looked at Ian, who, realizing they were awaiting an answer, shrugged and blushed again. “Well, I don’t really know. I’m just throwing out a theory here, but the Hollowers seem to borrow other languages in order to interact with their prey. My guess is that they don’t have a language of their own—a written language, at least. Although they seem able to sense and understand whatever they need once they’re in a dimension, they didn’t sense this. So it’s my guess that whatever advanced technology could create writing that translates itself could also create writing that is encoded somehow so the destroyers of
their race couldn’t read it even if they wanted to.”

  “I’d buy that,” Anita said. “But all this doesn’t put that artifact in our hands, or get us home. There’s nothing in that writing that tells us where they sent it, or how they got it there?”

  Ian shook his head apologetically.

  “I say we see what’s in these vaults,” Lauren said. “I mean, everything Ian translated for us is on the covers of these vaults. So maybe whatever we need to activate this door or find this artifact, whatever it is, is inside.”

  Erik sized up the cover of the vault nearest to him, running a finger along its lower edge. “It’s pretty solid. Probably pretty heavy.”

  “Can we lift it, the three of us?” Mendez indicated himself, Erik, and Ian.

  “Doubt it, but you might be able to lift it with the five of us.” Anita raised an eyebrow at her husband and he laughed.

  “You’re right, my dear. How about you and Lauren come around to my side, and Erik and Ian can take the other side?”

  They moved around the vault to the positions Mendez had suggested.

  “Okay,” Mendez said, “on the count of three, we’ll pick it up and move it down that way. Ready? One, two, three!”

  With a series of effortful grunts and the grating of stone against stone, they managed to first loosen, then slide the cover of one vault along its edge and clumsily topple it to the ground. They stood back, panting from the effort, and took a look inside.

  “Oh my God,” Anita said, blessing herself in old Roman Catholic tradition.

  The vault was bottomless, a well looking down on deep space full of stars and distant nebulae. Comets shot across the scope of their visible field, and Erik thought he saw a planet out there, wreathed by rings of shining dust. There was no sound, no sense of cold or warmth, no pull toward that planet and those stars. It was a portion of space neatly contained, a portal to the rest of that dimension’s celestial universe.

  “How...what.... Damn.” Erik looked up at Mendez. “We need to open the other one.”

  The five of them lined up in the same positions around the second vault. Mendez counted off again and they heaved the cover off and onto the ground.

  Inside the second vault’s deep space had a different configuration of stars, a system of small, rocky planets encircled by even smaller moons. Far off, galaxies swirled, bright and twinkling with the suns of countless solar systems.

  From the canyon around them, the rocks began to hum. That was the only way Erik could think to describe it; the rock structures—the ring and the slab, the vaults—began to vibrate slightly and emit a low hum. The parcels of space inside the vaults drew from deep within their silence a rushing sound like crashing waves.

  Behind them, layers of the stone slab’s surface crumbled and chipped away and Erik could see the galaxy inside it exposed beneath. Whole chunks of pale stone fell away, and Erik and the others found themselves standing in the center of a triangle of exposed outer space. They were struck dumb with awe, unable to move until that hum reached its peak and both the vaults and the slab took on a dark purple glow. Slowly, Erik backed away, he and Mendez shepherding the others out from the middle of the configuration.

  The glow of each space formed beams which shot out, meeting in the middle. As they poured into each other, the purple glow slid, almost like a liquid on glass, down the length of air beneath it, growing darker and darker. The tangy smell of ozone permeated the canyon.

  “It’s making a rip!” Ian called out.

  Erik thought he might be right. The dark spill of light from the intersecting beams folded in, pinching the air and finally puncturing it. Like the unzipping of a tent flap, a rip flared open, its edges rippling from the force of the purple beams above it.

  It was then that the canyon began to crumble. Shards and boulders thundered above them, sliding out of place. Erik felt the ground beneath him shake, the cliffs above echoing the sounds of moving rock.

  “What’s going on?” Lauren asked. Rocks tumbled down the side of the cliff. A large boulder fully the size of a man crashed down onto the archway over the path they had come down.

  “The canyon—it’s crumbling! It’s gonna landslide.” Erik looked at Mendez, then the rip, then back at Mendez, who nodded.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the others.

  “Where?” Anita asked.

  “Anywhere but here, my dear,” Mendez answered, and tugged his wife after Erik. Lauren and Ian followed suit.

  At the edge of the rip, Erik peered in. Beyond it was another night sky, but beneath it was a beautiful city containing strange buildings of sleek, dark stone and soft glowing lights. Erik didn’t give it much thought beyond that. He jumped, and the liquid black which swallowed him muted the sounds of falling rock behind him.

  ***

  In the dimension to which the Triumvirate had sent the meats, there had been many, many lightenings and darkenings since a lifekind had existed which had the capability of producing the complex emotions on which the Likekind fed. All that remained of life on that world were savage physical beings who engaged in the repulsive acts of sustaining and recreating physical life, and nothing else. The Triumvirate, however, found many of the kinds to be easily manipulated, both in their world and in others. Though the beings’ physicality rapidly deteriorated in the Earth world, they still retained enough instinct and cohesion long enough to destroy Earth beings, which was all the Triumvirate needed them for, anyway.

  Like so many beings in so many worlds, the continuation of a being’s essence was connected to the physical shell which contained it. The Likekind had learned long ago that to threaten that shell with damage or destruction was often sufficient to heighten the production of Emotions, and to ultimately crack that shell yielded much to quell the tearing, churning emptinesses that drove the Likekind to feed.

  The Triumvirate had also learned that many beings in many worlds fed instead on the shells of other, usually lesser, beings. While they could not fathom something so meaningless and revolting, they recognized that it often worked in their favor, in such instances as the Earth meats in the world a sentient lifekind once called Cayuad-bthl.

  That sentient lifekind had known its distinction was imminent. It had tried to stop it, to stop the Triumvirate Who Had Come Before. It had failed. None were left. The world belonged to the lesser lifekinds now.

  But that lifekind had left a message in those motionprints called “writing.” They had used that rare ability they and very few others seemed to have of crafting the motionprints so that the decipherer would “see” them in a language of their own world. It was, from what the Triumvirate had gathered, a technique they had used to record their most important knowledge, for the benefit of any who might come after.

  And the Triumvirate had been unable to detect it. They had been unable, from either the Convergence or from Cayuad-bthl, to sense and comprehend the message.

  That had been another sly skill of the extinct lifekind in the art of motionprints.

  The Triumvirate were angry that a dead lifekind had given the meats secrets. They were frustrated that the meats had figured out a way to access that dead lifekind’s means of conveyance. It made their own Hate strong enough to stir the inside into black holes inside into motion again. They had been tempted to seal up that world of bestial life with the Earth meats in it, but they had found some sort of rift created by the dead ones before their annihilation. The meats had activated it and it had moved them into a space outside the realm of known dimensions. The Triumvirate could not sense the meats at first. This did not alarm so much as frustrate them. It would take focus among them, but the meats would be found.

  Still, the meats were proving to be more resourceful and thus, more dangerous than at first perceived. The Likekind were right in wanting to see them terminated. Their numbers were not as they were during the Ages of Origin. There were so few of the Likekind left, and so many meats in the place called Earth. That such an inferior lifekind could, even
in comparatively small numbers, end the energies of any one of the Likekind was both a surprise and a threat to the Likekind as a whole. The Triumvirate, to whom all information flowed, and from whom all retribution was dealt, felt that such a situation could not be allowed to continue.

  It took quite a while for the Triumvirate to locate them in the new world, a place beyond even the Likekind’s notice. Perhaps that had been intentional. It was no matter. They had found the meats once again, and the Triumvirate were in agreement that it was time for the meats to die.

  Chapter 14

  Erik opened his eyes to what his mind told him were the sounds of summer nights—tree frogs and crickets. The air was stale but mild, and Erik found it a little easier to breathe. For a moment, he thought maybe they had slipped through a rip that had landed them right back on Earth somehow. But then he rose painfully and limped to the low, moonlight-streaked stone wall that surrounded the small city, fully taking in the buildings in front of him. It was obvious this was no place anywhere on his own home world.

  All the buildings as far as Erik could see were made of the same shiny stone, polished dark gray tinged with veins of bright blues and greens. The soft glow of blue and green lights was visible through keystone-shaped fixtures in crisscrossing gold holders hung at the gates, at the bases of staircases, adorning archways, and flanking doorways all throughout the city. None of the buildings had signs or symbols identifying their type, nor could Erik see any windows or doors. Erik approximated the center of the city from the placement of the tallest of the buildings, an imposing obelisk leaning impossibly both to the left and, further up, to the right, with a spiral twist at the top. It didn’t appear to have windows, but several long silver streamers lay against the walls in the usual places windows would appear in an office building. Occasionally, the breeze coaxed them into dancing for a moment and then let them go, and they’d clink against the surface of the polished stone. Several of the other smaller buildings imitated the oddly angled architecture by starting as obelisks and topping off with curving or leaning geometric feats and flourishes that seemed to defy gravity. A few bullet-shaped buildings surrounded the larger obelisks, with bony arcs, round blades, and fin-like structures embedded in the soft points of their peaks. The roads between buildings had been paved with shiny black stones in kidney shapes, more or less interlocking.