“Ai.”
“’Nuff said, then.” Barker slowed his pace, drifting back along the line. It touched Hanson that the sergeant would be looking out after him like that, though he doubted it was done out of any altruistic impulse. Men like Barker believed in keeping things calm, in damping things down before trouble had a chance to flare up. Hanson doubted very much that Barker could prevent the trouble that was brewing between him and Delgardo. But he admired him for trying.
Not long after, the stream curved to block their way. Luckily, there was a lacquered red bridge: wooden, arched, with railings to either side, looking perfectly out of place in its ordinariness. After a brief consultation with Delgardo, Hanson went over it by himself, each plank making a musical sound as he trod on it. When he reached the far side safely, he waved and the others ran across in a storm of bridge-song.
They were now beyond the previous explored areas, so there was no path to follow. Hanson asked Delgardo what they were looking for, and how he was supposed to find it when he didn’t know where they were going, but Delgardo had just looked scornful and said, “I’ll know it when I see it!,” although Hanson got the feeling that the smug air of superiority was only a facade to cover his own uncertainty. As Hanson had feared they would, they were heading toward the golden building-thing that had filled him with unease the night before. The Cathedral, he thought, and wondered where he had heard that name before. But at least it still seemed a good way off.
They had stopped for a break when they were startled by a sudden cry of fear. One of the soldiers―Miller? Fiske? Hanson was still having difficulty remembering who was who―had wandered a bit ahead and was pointing at a stand of flowering dwarf sequoias. A dark silhouette no thicker than his hand and as large as an elephant was picking its way daintily out of the trees. It had five long legs, all of different sizes, that tapered to points at the bottom and joined to form a hunched, headless torso at the top. The soldier raised his rifle to shoot at it.
Running with a speed he was amazed he was still capable of, Hanson managed to reach the soldier before he could fire and roughly seized the rifle barrel, pushing it to the side. “You don’t need to do that. It’s harmless. It’s a… a… a gardener. It plants seeds and trims trees, that’s all.” As they watched, the gardener paused to scoop a hole in the turf and then, with another limb, plucked a seedling from within its shadowy interior, and gently settled it into place. “A’n’t nothing to be afraid of.” Except, Hanson thought, for some other device, lurking unseen, that might take action to protect the gardener, if they looked like they might damage it. He’d run afoul of one such, before, and didn’t look forward to a second bout.
“I’m not afraid of nothing!” the boy snapped. He snatched away his rifle and indignantly started back toward the others. His path, though, was different from the meandering way he had come for, with shocking abruptness, something seized him and slammed him to the ground. Struggling weakly, pressed flat to the ground, obviously unable to rise, he cried, “Help! Help! It’s crushing me!”
The soldiers came running. At a barked order from Delgardo, two of them flung themselves down on the ground and crawled rapidly forward on their elbows to seize Dawkins—Hanson had decided it was neither Miller or Fiske, but rather Dawkins—by the ankles. Four more soldiers seized the legs of those two and pulled, so that, almost effortlessly, Dawkins was slid backward and out of the crushing zone, where gravity was, apparently, many times greater than it was in the ordinary world.
Sergeant Barker unbuttoned Dawkins’s shirt and examined his torso with a gentleness that could not have been bettered by the boy’s own mother before pronouncing him shaken but fundamentally unhurt. “There’ll be bruising,” he said, “that’s all.”
Hanson put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’re lucky,” he said. “That’s good. Lucky is a good thing to be.” He paused, thought better of what he was about to say, and then thought better of not saying it. “Don’t push that luck too far, though, a’right?” Turning away, he shouted, “Somebody fetch me a sack of flour!”
When one of the soldiers―Chan? Phillips? Marini?—had passed the flour to Hanson from the supplies on the Stumper, he dug a hand deep inside it and then flung the hand outward. White dust floated in the air. He took three steps forward and flung another handful. It too floated away. Two steps forward, a third fist of flour. This time, however, the flour drifted on the air—and then suddenly slammed to the ground.
Hanson grunted in satisfaction. The other times he had tried this trick, he’d had to use sand. Flour was much better. He flung further handfuls to either side of the stain. They too slammed downward.
Systematically, with meticulous caution, Hanson walked up and down the sharp-edged line of white, until it was clear that it was wider in one direction than the other. He continued to fling flour and follow the narrow white triangle he was creating until its two sides fined down to a point, touching a small, glowing purple tile set in the ground. It could have been covered by a thumb. “A’right. It’s marked now. Just go ’round by the front and you’ll be fine.”
Delgardo, smiling, turned to Hanson. “Is this something you saw before?”
“Ai.”
“Did it never occur to you to dig there, when you found one of these spots?”
“No,” Hanson answered, not seeing the point, “it never did. Sir.”
“Manshogger!” Delgardo said, almost fondly. Then, turning back to his men, he commanded, “Shovels out! Dig here!”
Several minutes’ painstaking work unearthed… something. It was deep red, the size of a man’s forearm, slick-surfaced, and smelled of cinnamon. Delgardo passed a hand over its surface and it turned emerald green. “It’s off now,” he said, and tossed it to one of his men. “Wrap that up and stow it away in the Stumper.” Then, raising his voice, “We made our first find, boys!”
They cheered.
To his horror, Hanson heard himself ask, “What is it?”
“No idea,” Delgardo said cheerily, giving him a hearty whack between the shoulder blades. “Down at the front, they’ve figured out how to put it to good use and they call it a gravity gun. But I seriously doubt it was ever intended to be used as a weapon, don’t you?”
Hanson shrugged.
“We manshoggers, though… We can turn almost anything into a weapon. That’s our gift. It’s what separates you and me from the animals.” Without transition, Delgardo pointed toward the distant golden building. “We’ve been walking for hours and the Cathedral hasn’t gotten any closer. How far away do you think it is? How big do you think it is?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about that thing. I don’t think we should go there,” Hanson said, remembering only at the last instant to add, “sir.” He did not mention the sensation, which he could not shake, that it was studying him, nor his suspicion that it was keeping its distance, moving on enormous legs, perhaps, the way some of the structures in the City could, while it made up its mind what to do about them. Nor did he ask how Delgardo knew its name.
Delgardo laughed. “You want to live forever, Hanson?” he said sarcastically. Then he shouted to the soldiers, “Get your asses in gear, boys! I bet we can reach that sumbitch by sundown.”
Not long after that conversation, they lost their first soldier.
8
THEIR PROGRESS WAS SLOW, for they had to constantly scan the land before them for potential dangers and, though Phillips (if that’s who it is) carefully charted their way on gridded mapping paper, their compasses did not work here at all, so they had to rely on dead reckoning, with the Cathedral as their one fixed landmark.