11
Cassandra
AS OUR CARAVAN APPROACHED the river bounding Cassandra, I could see why the Ascendants had not been able to destroy the town. Protonic cannons lined the riverbank: steel-blue cylinders pointed at the sky, steaming in the morning sun. Earthen berms and small brick outbuildings rose beside them, and from these swarmed figures clad in the dusty blue hoods and tunics I slowly realized must be the uniform of the Asterine Alliance. Most of these figures were men and women; but there were others who went about unclothed, or wearing abbreviated versions of the uniform. Aardmen with their hunched gait; ethereal argalæ, struggling to carry the smallest cartons in their frail twiglike arms; cacodemons and huge and horrible four-legged things like equine men. All of them moved busily along the shore, like the apocalyptic figures in a recusant’s tapestry brought to life. Beyond them the river was wide and brilliant as the sky, and as calm. I could see where fish were rising to snap at clouds of insects, and where a motorized dinghy V’ed lazily through the placid waters as though on no more serious errand than fishing, heading for the far shore.
“There’s a checkpoint ahead,” Cadence warned us. She pointed to a ramshackle metal building at river’s edge. Immediately past it a bridge spanned the water, its rusted spans repaired with wooden beams and salvaged metal. “ I’ll take care of everything.” She glanced at Jane, then turned back to the wheel. Jane looked affronted. She stuck her chin in the air and in beleaguered silence joined me at the open window.
The van crept the last few yards toward the guardhouse. People had stopped their work—mostly hauling crates and canisters from several other ancient caravans parked near the cannons—and stood in small groups, staring at us as the sentries waved us through. Beside the guardhouse a huge figure stood by a smaller, hooded one, inspecting something that might have been a transformer or some kind of old ’file transmitter. As I watched, the larger creature turned, very very slowly, and stared at us as we passed. I had an impression of fawn-colored skin and slightly darker hair, and eyes that were black and implacable as a starless sky.
At that unblinking gaze a cold tongue of dread licked at me, and I shuddered. Even from a distance there was something eerie, almost obscene, about that form. As though some ancient monolith had begun to move—like the City’s Obelisk or Sorrowful Lincoln—something formed over the course of aeons out of marble and fire and blood; something that should never have been given life. The thing watched our caravan rattle by, its huge hands holding the dully gleaming core of the transmitter as though it were a hollow log. As the van rounded a corner, I turned to look back at it. For an instant its eyes met mine, and I gasped.
Because those eyes—pupilless, cold and deep as black water—were utterly without guile or hatred. For all the grotesque immensity of its body, the gaze that met mine glowed with the rapturous curiosity of a child’s.
“What is that?” I whispered.
Jane stared after it, her face drawn.
“Energumen,” she said. I knew from her expression that she had never before seen one alive.
Nor had I. I had never even quite believed that they existed, let alone that one might work peacefully side by side with humans. The notion had seemed too ludicrously horrible even for the Ascendants: deformed, bioengineered clones twice the size of a man, created to serve as slaves in the HORUS colonies and the most distant reaches of the Archipelago.
This one, though, had not been quite so large as I had imagined—perhaps only two feet taller than a man, though beside it that solitary human had looked spindly and utterly inconsequential in his loose uniform. I stared after them until our caravan began to cross the bridge.
“Christ,” Jane muttered. She stood beside me and looked dispiritedly out at the rusted spars and sagging cables. “We’re in for it now, Wendy.”
I pointed to where dull-gray canisters and spiky arrays of wire and metal had been bound to the struts with lengths of barbed wire, until the whole thing looked like the work of some great caddisworm. Jane nodded glumly.
“Explosives. They’ve got the whole thing rigged so that if anyone tries to cross—like, say, someone trying to rescue us—the bridge will go under— pfft —like that.”
In the front seat Cadence turned and gave us a warning look. Jane grew silent, crossing her arms on her chest and casting a baleful glance to where Suniata stood in silence beside the driver’s seat, his round carp’s-eyes fixed on the road before us.
And so we reached the shores of Cassandra. Behind us the placid waters of the Shenandoah curled out of sight between the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Ahead of us stretched the road, wider now, with long gouges in the red clay where shallow trenches had been dug and rudimentary channels stood half-full of rusty-looking water. Our caravan slowed, creeping to avoid boulders and trees that had fallen in the course of constructing more armories and crude storage buildings. There were many men and women working here, wearing the hooded blue uniform of the Alliance, as well as a number of energumens: all carrying sacks of meal and grain, dragging great steel beams across the wounded ground, pulling the broken axle from beneath a pile of wreckage. Compared to their slight, almost scrawny forebears, the energumens were surprisingly graceful, with smooth, heavily muscled bodies. Most wore only a loose linen skirt about their narrow waists. Their skins were different colors—the same vibrant red as the Virginia clay; a dusky bluish-brown, like the flesh of a muscat grape; an ivory tone like fluid wax.
But what I found strangest about them was their faces. Or rather, their face —because they all shared the same features. Large intelligent eyes above rounded cheeks, wide foreheads, childish round mouths. Jane grimaced when they stopped their work and gazed after us, but to me they looked like grotesquely large children. Only their eyes betrayed their demonic origins, with black iris and cornea and tiny white pupils, and the same expression of intense inquisitiveness as they watched us pass.
There was another checkpoint up ahead, and an even more staggering array of weaponry, all of it arranged in shining, neatly ordered columns beneath the lacquered blue sky. At the sight, even Jane’s customary irony turned to disbelief.
“Scarlet was right,” she said. Outside, two energumens worked on a metal platform that supported a satellite dish twice the size of our van. On the ground beneath them another energumen manipulated a control panel. Slowly the entire apparatus swiveled, liked a monstrous clockwork toy. “This really is war.”
“Not just war.” Cadence looked over her shoulder while she steered the caravan with her one hand. “Jihad.”
Jane frowned. “Jihad?” Suniata nodded, and Cadence smiled triumphantly.
“ Holy war,” she said. “To avenge them, and redeem ourselves.”
“Redeem who ?” Jane asked suspiciously.
“Us. All of humanity.” Cadence’s voice took on the same ringing tone I had heard in Miss Scarlet’s when she played one of the more ardent roles in her repertoire, Saint Joan or Clytemnestra or Maw-ree Zilus. The van veered dangerously close to a stack of bricks as she went on. “This is a war of redemption—yours, ours, all of humanity’s! We sought to enslave the world, and like all slaves the world has finally rebelled. It is up to us, for those humans who have joined the Alliance, to redeem our race. The Earth will be cleansed of humanity. We will free those beings we created, end their centuries of servitude, so that at last they can take their places beside us in a new world—”