Kallista hauled open the lid of her footlocker, throwing aside items of clothing and personal effects in her desperation. Her bottle of sakau was hidden in a hollowed out copy of Fanfare to Unity, a dreadful piece of fawning sycophancy that no one would ask to borrow.
“Please,” she moaned, lifting the dog-eared copy of the book. She opened it and lifted out a green glass bottle, mostly full of a cloudy emulsion.
She pulled herself upright, her vision blurring at the edges with flickering lights, the telltale signs of the fire. Every muscle was trembling as she lurched across the tent to her writing table where the hes vase sat alongside her papers and writing implements.
Her hands spasmed with a spastic jerk, and the bottle fell from her hands.
“Throne, no!” cried Kallista as it bounced on the dirt floor, but, mercifully, didn’t break.
She bent down, but a wave of nausea and pain washed over her, and she knew it was too late for the sakau. There was only one way to let the fire out.
Kallista collapsed to the folding chair at the table, and her trembling hand snatched up a knife-sharpened pencil before dragging a sheet of scrap paper towards her.
Scrawled notes regarding yesterday’s incredible expedition into the Mountain filled the top of the page.
She turned it over angrily as the fire in her brain blinded her, her eyes rolling back as its white heat seared through her body its luminous light filling her every molecule with its power. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, jaw locked as her hand scratched across the page in manic, desperate sweeps.
The words poured out of Kallista Eris, but she neither saw nor knew them.
IT WAS THE heat that woke her.
Kallista opened her eyes slowly, the searing brightness of Aghoru’s sun filling her tent with yellow light and oppressive heat. She licked her dry lips, her mouth parched as though she hadn’t drunk in days.
She was asleep at her desk, a broken pencil still clutched in her hand, a sheaf of papers fanned around her head. Kallista groaned as she lifted her head from the table, dizzy and disoriented by the brightness of the sun and the dislocation of waking.
Gradually, her memory reordered itself, and she dimly recalled the half-remembered city of her dreams and its dreadful ending. The pain in her head was a dull ache, a mental bruise that left her dull and numb.
Kallista reached out and poured some water from the hes vase. It was gritty with wind-blown salt, but served to dispel the gumminess that had collected around her mouth.
Spots of water landed on the pages strewn across the desk, and she saw that they were completely covered in frantic writing. She rose awkwardly to her feet, her limbs still unsteady after their abuse during the night, and backed away from the desk.
Kallista sat on her bed, staring at the desk as though the papers and pencils were dangerous animals instead of the tools of her trade. She rubbed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair, sweeping it over her ears as she pondered what to do next.
Scores of sheets were filled with writing, and she swallowed, unsure whether she even wanted to look and see what this latest fugue state had produced. Most of the time it was illegible nonsense, meaningless doggerel. Kallista never knew what any of them meant, and if she was too late to extinguish the fire before it began with a soporific infusion of sakau, she ripped the papers to pieces.
Not so this time.
Kallista looked at the angular writing that was not hers, and the morning’s heat was replaced with a sudden chill.
One phrase was written on the crumpled papers, over and over and over, repeated on every sheet a thousand times.
CAMILLE CLEARED THE dust of ages from the smooth object buried in the earth with delicate sweeps of a fine brush. It was curved and polished, and showed no sign it had been hidden for thousands of years. She slowly chipped around the object, marvelling at its condition as more of it was revealed. It was pale cream and had survived without any corrosion or so much as a blemish.
It could have been buried yesterday.
More careful brushes revealed a bulbous protrusion further along its length, something that looked like a vox-unit. She had never seen such a design, for it appeared it had been moulded as one piece. She chipped away more of the earth, pleased to have found an artefact that was clearly of non-human origin.
She paused, thinking back to the titanic statues, recognising a similarity between the material of this object and the giants. For all she knew, this could be part of something just as vast. A ghost of apprehension made her shiver, though she was still wearing her gloves, and had been careful not to touch the find with her bare hands.
Camille stretched the muscles in her back and wiped her arm across her forehead. Even shaded from the direct rays of the sun, the heat was oppressive.
With more of the object revealed, she lifted her picter unit, clicking off a number of shots from differing angles and ranges. The camera had been a gift from her grandfather, an old Model K Seraph 9 he’d sourced from an Optik in the Byzant markets, who’d looted it from a prospector he’d killed in the Taurus Mountains around the Anatolian plateau, who in turn had purchased it in pre-Unity days from a shift overseer in a manufactory of the Urals, where it had been built by an assembly servitor who had once been a man called Hekton Afaez.
Camille looked around, holding her breath as she listened for sounds of anyone nearby. She could hear the repetitive bite of picks and shovels from her digging team of servitors, the gentle murmur of daily life from the nearby Aghoru settlement, and the ever-present hiss of salt crystals blown by the wind.
Satisfied she was alone, she pulled off one of her gloves, her ivory white hand in stark contrast to the dark tan of her arm. The skin was delicate and smooth, not the hand one might expect to see on someone who spent time digging in the earth.
Camille slowly lowered her hand to the half-buried object, gently laying it on top with a soft sigh of pleasure. A comfortable numbness soon reached her shoulder and chest. The feeling was not unpleasant, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the new emotions that came to her.
She felt the thread of history that connected all things and the residue left by those who had touched them. The world around her was dark, but the object before her was illuminated as though by some internal light source.
It was a battle helmet, an exquisite artefact of fluid, graceful design, and it was unmistakably alien in the subtle wrongnessof its proportions. It was old, very old; so old, in fact, that she had difficulty in grasping so distant an age of time.
A shape resolved in the darkness, her touch breathing life into the memory of the helmet’s long dead owner. Behind her fluttering eyelids, Camille saw the shadow of a woman, a dancer by the fluidity of her movements. She spun through the void like liquid, her body in constant motion between graceful leaps, her arms and fists sweeping out in what Camille realised were killing blows. This woman was not just a dancer, she was a warrior.
A word came to her, a name perhaps: Elenaria.
Camille watched, entranced by the subtle weave of the dancer’s body as it twisted like smoke on a windy day. The shadow woman left blurred afterimages in the darkness, as though a phantom sisterhood followed in her wake. The more Camille watched, the more it seemed as though she watched thousands of women, all moving in the same dance, yet separated by fleeting moments in time.
The dancers slid through the air, and Camille was filled with aching sadness. Their every pirouette and graceful somersault gave voice to the sorrow and regret carried in their hearts like poison. She gasped as a potent mix of heightened emotions surged into her from the buried object, supreme pinnacles of ecstasy that were matched only by depths of utter misery.