Nano Writing Month, 2017.13

[mc776]

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

You fool! I keep telling you, Lure them into the city, use its natural configuration to our advantage. And yet you still insist on this waste, this madman's assault, this idiot's flailing!

His captor nursed a set of knuckles bloody from punching the tablet. "How dare you! How dare you question my ability, my leadership in a time like this, after all I've done for you! Even now their defences are being overwhelmed, with no risk to our secrets being discovered! We will destroy them and the victory shall soon be mine! Now hurry up and get this power unlocked so we can get off this blasted miserable rock!" He pointed a shaking red-smeared finger at the rotting metal. "You are not in a position to teach me anything!"

Good, good. His captor had completely bought into this being his own idea. Killing the bounty hunters in a total surprise ambush deep within the city would very likely have worked - and thus failed to buy him the time he needed. He almost despaired when his captor first suggested it; but some quick thinking and an offhand condescending backhanded compliment while voicing his exaggerated agreement was enough to turn things around.

But what now? Ideally he could withdraw the forces into the city and force the privateers to clear it room by room. But if this storm were to let up to the point where they could, say, just fly over the city with whatever quadrotors or dropship or jetpacks they might have... and if not, his captor would certainly notice him snatching stalemate from the jaws of perceived victory.

How many of them did they even have in the city now? He had estimated there were at least twenty thousand within the city walls, possibly up to fifty or even a hundred thousand depending on how far the old tunnels went down. They didn't seem to need much oxygen, and there was plenty of mold and geothermic vent slime for them to eat. (He discounted, of course, their frequent eating of each other.)

The bounty hunters had killed about two thousand or so in the past hour.

...

Listening to his captor's delusional boasts about his own military genius highlighted for him just how tragically divorced maps were from their territories, signifiers from their signified.

In recent years he had learned to use the golden tablet's telepathic interface to probe their minds as they milled about and defecated and ate and killed each other in and around the temple in which the tablet was housed. Distorted and crude as their senses were, he was eventually able to piece together a fairly decent image of what the surrounding area was like.

It was a dismal travesty of what was in the tablet's records. Millennia of age and neglect had taken their toll everywhere. It was not unexpected; indeed, it was a testament to the Old Ones' ability that so much had survived at all.

On the walls of the temple were many pictures, graven even now deep as a spear into the mouldering green stone. They depicted scenes from a world long gone, of vegetation and animals, civilization and savagery, the suffering and hope of the peoples that made them. They hinted at what was in the tablet, more or less, and the the tablet's own records of those carvings came with a handy concordance.

Most of the real images had been destroyed, or crudely re-fashioned to depict nonsense or obscene things and acts, or at best remade to refer to fleeting references to fads and outrages long past. The revisions became cruder and more obscene near the tops of the broken walls that could be easily scaled, and closer to the ground, though the ones right by the floor were spared the worst of it in lieu of simple destruction and wear. Even the crudest and most obscene marks on the stones, however, were pitted and warped from age. Fresh feces and other debris covered everything.

One line of these carvings in the entry hall survived, high enough not to be defaced and low enough not to have been taken out with the roof. What it portrayed would look instantly familiar to a Terran, at least in the first part.

At the leftmost, after a long line of remnants of vegetation and animals and wandering mountains, was something not at all unlike - albeit flat and pincer-jawed and creeping along on a dozen little flippers - a fish. It was confused and burdened, its gills panting for air as it crept upwards and further into the land before it. To the viewer's right it followed another vaguely fish-like being, a little less fish-like and a little more comfortable on its many legs. If the eye were to continue right, it would find another being, a true native of dry land, its head bowed in humility as it faced the backside of another even greater one, and so on... until, serpentine and beetle-jawed, four-armed and noseless he may be, we came across our first man.

And with these men we saw their all too familiar ascent, from hunched half-bestial goblins to erect tool-users to the stern, high-browed noble beings. And noble they looked indeed, even in this ruined state: tall and sturdy, carrying a staff with no spear point, dignified were they in carriage but unstilted in their demeanour, a long flowing mane framing a gently angled face and a liveliness and compassion in their eyes - turned ever slightly towards the viewer, as though noticing them for the first time - that still yet survived these millennia of rain and wind and mould.

But the sequence did not stop there. Another image followed it, more similar to it than it was to its semi-erect predecessor, but clearly changed: larger, more robust. It held two swords and a sceptre, and on its lofty brow was a wondrous crown. A race of warriors and kings, straighter and prouder than the old men, but the eyes had not yet lost that compassion. They did seem somewhat... bored?

Another followed. Anatomically it looked almost identical to the one before it, but the head was raised just a little bit higher, and the crown and mane were different: and yet these were enough to make it look like a wholly different species. There was a stiffness to the figure not found in those before it, a slight clenching of the entire body in something evocative both of anger and fear. The narrowed eyes looked down upon the viewer with a practised contempt.

The next figure was again turned in profile as the beasts and proto-men. It hunched forwards and bristled, leering in barely-controlled rage, its mandibles grown to a pair of long bitter tusks, its crown a sneering, violent thing of predatory fangs and spikes. In place of a sceptre was a gun, and its body was coiled around a hoard of skulls and gold.

Of the remaining living souls on the planet now, only the captive (and one other, but he seemed to have disappeared) would have understood the significance of the next figures: the Old Ones had a specific visual style - a certain boldness of line, an anonymity of detail - that they used only to depict that which was not, but might have been or could yet be to come.

The mane, once a lovely flowing feathered ornament, was a shaggy, matted layer of armour for the face and throat. Cruel fangs jutted out from once clean and stern mandibles, twisted and formless, reaching out like roots in deranged thirst for violence. The entire figure was stooped and ready to pounce, its face forever fixed into a hateful sneer. Tiny eyes glittered from sunken sockets shrouded in unnatural darkness. Even the crown was a hideous crude beak, jutting forwards from a cruel and thoughtless brow ridge where the forehead once was.

The final image had no crown. Its eyes were pulpy white voids quivering, glaring out from mindless, noisome shadows deep in the recesses of a leprous skull. Shaggy, rotting fur framed a forest of envenomed fangs, set upon a long, slithering spine-like body wrapped in a cage of obscene, knife-like limbs, coiled around the crumbling skull of what might once have been a man.

One of them lay rotting beneath it, shot by the fugitive Billy Robertson alias Victor Guillaume, when he had come in to retrieve the artifact from the golden tablet.

Outside, at the gates of the temple were several broken slabs of stone. There once were other stones, long forgotten, that held these up. They had been held up alongside other stones, and engraved on them were the letters of a tongue no longer spoken between men:

FOR OUR DEAREST SONS - WHENEVER THEY MAY RETURN.

...

The storm would soon let up. The temple was well within the city perimeter, so their pursuers couldn't simply fly over to the east end of the city and scoop up his captor. The temple itself still potentially had a few (potentially) operable anti-air defences that may or may not have escaped the bounty hunters' scanners. Perhaps if they--

"What is taking so long? You stupid machine-man! Stop holding back! Victory is ours for the taking!"

Fine. Have as you will. I shall deploy one mass attack to wipe them out from their northern flank. But we are running out of them with no reinforcements in sight: if this fails, we must retreat into the city and prepare for a siege until our adversaries' supplies run out.

"Fool. You will do what I say, and be humbled at how it will all fall into place!"

And that was how over three thousand of them were led to their deaths under the lingering burn of a single plasma grenade.