Empty Vessels – part nine of eleven
by Eildon Rhymer
The water churned, slapping against his ankles in waves. Something fell into the water, and he snapped his head upwards, and dust and grit fell into his eyes. "We need to get out," the woman said again.
Yes, he thought. Yes, we do. He was their leader, wasn't he? But at the same time he felt as if he was newly awakened. There was a gap in his memory, full of nothing but darkness. What had happened in that time? What had happened?
Who was he?
He dropped his gun, then cried out, grabbing it from the water. Did that mean it was ruined? He wiped it dry, then shrank down, making himself small by pulling his head down into his shoulders. Grit hit the back of his neck. "It shouldn't be falling," he said. "There's no reason why it should be falling. It doesn't make sense."
"It doesn't matter why. It's happening; that's what matters." That was the injured man speaking. He'd been half dead when they'd left him. Before that, he had been babbling, unable to form words.
He wandered over to him. "Are you…?"
"Yes." The man nodded, then shook his head. "No. It hurts like hell. I don't know how much longer I can keep going, but up here…" His blood-stained fingers rose to his brow. "It's better here." One side of his mouth turned upwards in a smile. "Not much use when we're dead, huh?"
Dead? Oh. Yes. The expanse of darkness seemed to have driven away all the panic that he really ought to be feeling. He felt it coming back now. "We have to get out."
"Yeah." The injured man frowned. "What about these guys?"
The four of them were the only ones standing, he saw. The others were still on their knees. He gingerly snapped his fingers in front of the eyes of the nearest one, and there was no response at all. "Why…?" He swallowed, wincing at another rock fell. "Why are they…?"
"Empty vessels," the injured man said quietly. "Emptied too far." Then he grabbed his arm, suddenly urgent. "Come on. We have to go."
"Yeah," he said, and moistened his lips. "But where?"
Silver, he thought. Silver had guided him. He saw it in shattered specks on the choppy water. Go towards the silver.
Memory was a faint and fragile thing. He remembered collapsing, but after that was just a chaotic mix of darkness and silver. He had faint flashes of images of his own feet being put one in front of the other, of his own hand trembling on a gun. Then he had awakened in the wreckage of his own mind, to find that he still had hardly anything at all.
But enough, perhaps.
"What are you doing?" shouted the man whose arm he had grabbed. "That's not the way out."
"We never knew the way out." He had not meant to say it out loud.
"We have to go. God!" It was loud, almost like a scream. "We're going to die here! Come on! We've got to go!"
Perhaps the silver really was guiding him. Perhaps the darkness had left something in his mind - a little sliver of knowledge that it had not wanted to impart, but which somehow remained. Perhaps he knew other things, too: what it felt like to drain a man of everything, relishing the delicious taste of memories and reason; what it felt like to feed on the terror of the truly empty, slithering through the void that remained in their mind; what it felt like to boil with bitterness because you were far from home. "Here," he said, but quietly.
"He's gone crazy," someone said. "Quick. Help me. He's -"
"No. There." He raised his hand, dark against silver. A door. A stair. A way out that was so near, yet so impossible to reach.
"But --" An enormous crash. "Stop him!"
"No, he's right." Another shape pushed past him. "There's a way out."
He stopped with his foot on the bottom of the winding stair. "Are you able to…?"
"We'll see." The injured man looked terrible, his face pallid in the moonlight, with dark shadows under his eyes.
I did that. It still made something twist like a knife inside him, but the intense image of the man falling was gone, replaced by a normal memory.
"I'll help…"
"No. I'll manage." The man flashed a strained smile. "Too narrow. Single file."
He let the man go first, so he could catch him if he fell. The stair twisted up in a spiral, each step hewn from stone. After a few steps, they were in total darkness, and he had to feel for each step with his toes, and feel his way with his hand on the wall to his left. It trembled beneath his touch.
"What if it all falls?" said the man who had wanted to be their leader, panting after only two dozen steps. "This place is falling - and why on earth is that happening? - and these steps… are just held up… by this central… pillar… so if it…"
"We all go tumbling down," the injured man said from in front of him. His steps were far from steady, but little of that came through in his voice.
"Oh. Very comforting. Is that supposed… to make me… feel better, because…. by then… we'll be dead."
"Then climb faster."
"You're the one… in front. You're the one… setting the pace."
"Then go in front of me. You can…" The man broke off, and he heard the sound of a body striking stone, of a foot sliding off the narrow point of the step. He caught the man; steadied him. The others, back behind half a curve of spiral, probably did not notice. "Go ahead," the injured man continued, as if he had not been interrupted. "Hurry upstairs like a fleet gazelle and find your way outside."
He heard the other man panting behind him, almost speaking, then stopping himself. "I'll stay here," the man said at last. "Don't want to… get ahead… of you… and leave you… behind."
The pillar trembled. Behind them, something rumbled and crashed. "That was the stairs," the man behind him said. "The bottom steps. We can't go back. What if this just… ends? Can't go forward, can't go back. We'll just… have to… cling here… until we… fall."
How high was the surface? They were encased in a dark tube, and although the ground was far below them, it was a little like being buried. It made his fist tighten angrily. It made him want his gun.
They must have climbed a hundred steps by now. Behind them came the sound of the lower levels falling; she felt the trembling through her feet.
"We're going to die," said the man in front of her.
"All we can do is try."
She felt the urgency of every step, but inside she felt softer. The darkness was gone. Ever so slowly, ever so gently, she lowered those walls in her mind, and nothing pressed back, nothing surged in to fill the gap.
"We're going to…"
She touched the man firmly on the middle of the back, feeling his heaving breathing and his trembling. If he had been about to say something else, he stopped it. After a while, she withdrew her hand.
"Light," he gasped, after forty more steps. "Is that light?"
She blinked, and saw the faint outline of the man ahead of her. After two more steps, she saw a slant of light coming from above. Two more, and she saw the big man's shoulder, disappearing round the turn. Two more, and she heard him say something sharply. Two more, and the injured man was down on his knees on a flat stone threshold, his head sagging, and his arm held out behind him, as if to tell the others to stay away.
She stood beside him, and looked up at the sky, and despite everything, she could not keep herself from smiling at the silver moonlight and the breeze on her face.
"You can't," the injured man gasped, "stay here."
No. She shook her head, not speaking it aloud. The grass around the threshold was quivering, and she felt as if she was standing on a thin crust above nothing.
"What do you mean 'you'?" The smaller man had his hand pressed to his chest, and his breath was heaving. "You're just…"
"Go!" The injured man tried to stand up, but just lurched sideways, his hand outstretched, flapping urgently.
"Over my dead body." They all spoke at once, all making similar statements of denial, but it was the shorter man who spoke the loudest, using those words. "Help him up."
But the big man was already doing so. "I can walk," the injured man protested, though his body gave lie to his words. "No," he moaned urgently. "No. Split up. Spread the weight."
They obeyed him, just a little, moving a few paces away from him; it hurt to go any further. "Go where?" the smaller man gasped, his head darting from side to side, fear etched on his face by the moonlight.
"To the trees."
They had only just reached them when the crust of the world behind them crumbled, falling into the enormous hole beneath.
The hole was immense. Despite the agony that filled his whole body now, he dragged himself to the brim - "no, don't!" shouted the man called Hero. "You'll fall in!" - but the moonlight was not bright enough to show him the bottom.
"All those people," the woman said quietly, from behind him.
"Savages," Hero said harshly. "They tried to kill us. They…" His voice faded. The harshness had faded before that.
"People just like us," he found himself saying, knowing it was true, "who didn't get out in time." Vessels that had been drained of everything that they had once had, so there was nothing left when the darkness moved away from them. "People just like us," he said, remembering how it had felt to have lost his words.
"And dead now." The big man was clutching his gun, and he turned away sharply, hiding his face.
"Yes."
"So what do we do now?" Hero said, after a while.
"Move away from the hole, at least."
It was harder and harder to stay conscious. The big man supported him, and he concentrated on keeping his legs beneath him, and concentrated on stopping the trees from doubling and trebling, and stopping the silver from flowing into a sea of white that consumed everything.
People spoke. When he heard them, he understood what they were saying, but he knew that there were whole periods of time when he heard nothing. "I don't think he can last much longer." That was something that he did hear. He mumbled that he was still walking, that he wasn't going to give up just yet, but he saw the concerned looks that passed between the three of them.
When they emerged from the trees, though, he was the first to see it. At first he thought it was made of solid moonlight, but then he saw that its silver was much darker, and that its glow came from muted reflected light. He said something - what, he did not know - and then the others saw it, too, so he knew that it was not a dream.
"What is it?"
"Some sort of… vessel?"
"An enemy?"
"No. Ours." But, Mine was what his heart believed. His hand moved despite himself, groping into a pocket, pulling out one of the things he had studied right at the start of all this, and had dismissed as inexplicable. He pressed a button, and the back of the silver vessel opened.
"Are you sure it's safe?"
He did not bother answering. Pulling himself free from the big man's arms, he headed inside, supporting himself on sleek silver. The big man took his shoulders, tried to steer him onto one of the benches, but he wrenched himself free a second time. He stumbled, went down onto one knee, and pulled himself up again. The second time he fell, he was able to pull himself up with a hand on the back of the chair at the front; he was able to turn it round, to lower himself into it, to close his eyes.
"What…?" The others were stiff behind him, questioning.
He smiled at them, and reached out his hand - it was steady now, no longer trembling - and touched the controls. Silver flowed through his veins. Light blossomed in his mind. The vessel shivered like an animal stirring from sleep, and slowly rose into the air.
"We're flying…"
"Yes," he said, and he had to smile, because the alternative was tears. They rose towards the moonlight, and then into the black, but if this darkness wanted him, then being wanted by it was nothing short of wonderful. Silver flowed through him, and he still had no idea who he was, but it no longer mattered. His body blazed with pain and his skin burned with fever, but the silver inside him was a balm, and not even the pains of his body could hurt him quite so much any more.
"But where are we going?" Hero had sat down in the seat beside him.
He shook his head. "No idea."
"Then…"
He removed his hand from the controls, so they were floating quietly in the black.
"What if…?" Hero was clenching and unclenching his hand. "I'm feeling really sleepy. What if we fall asleep, and when we wake up, we remember everything? What if we find out that we're mortal enemies? You're not all going to try to kill me, are you? We can have a truce?"
"We can have a truce," the woman said gently.
He looked out at distant stars. Nearer reality was fading, blurring at the edges. The people beside him were turning into ghosts.
"I… I don't want to find out that you're all my enemies," Hero said.
"Then we will not be," said the woman. "Whoever we are, whatever we were before this, we are friends now."
"Huh." Hero grunted nervously. "We might be leaders on opposing sides. This might end a war that's raged for generations."
He saw the big man's head lolling forward. The woman was clearly struggling to keep her eyes open. Of course we're not enemies, he tried to say, but his tongue could not shape the words.
"It's been…" Hero's head fell forward, then he snatched it up again. "I can't think of an adjective. Wild. Crazy. Quite horrible, really, but…" He pressed his lips together; opened them again, but said nothing. A few moments later, his head fell forward onto the controls, and did not rise.
Through heavy eyelids, he looked at the three of them: strangers, companions, friends. He still had no idea what their names were, but their sleeping faces felt suddenly familiar, with a familiarity that almost hurt.
At least we came out of it together, he thought,and that was the last thing before he slept.
end of part nine
