"Ghosts." Hummingbird hesitated, remaining crouched in the entranceway. "You've seen what lived – the microflora – but they did not make this shrine. This is memory made solid."
"How?" Anderssen backed away from the wall, swinging the gun to cover the rest of the room. "You mean like Russovsky?"
Hummingbird waved for her to get behind him once she reached the archway. "I have not seen this before myself," he said in a low voice, "but the pyramid contains references to such things. The valkar is dreaming, but it is not powerless. A subtle influence extends throughout this world, power seeping from the hidden heart. Even when the crust was shattered and remade, not all memories of what lived here before died." He began to back up into the hallway. Nervous, Gretchen followed.
A white frost began to form on her breather mask, which was worrying. The night air of Ephesus was far below freezing, but the respirator should be trapping the water vapor in her breath. Only CO2 should be escaping. "Crow, something's happening…it's getting very, very cold."
Hummingbird turned up the intensity of his wand and raised the light high. Shadows fled away down the passage.
"There's something here," the nauallis hissed in alarm, staring intently around at the glassy walls. Gretchen tried to hurry, but the glassy floor immediately betrayed her. One foot flew out and she crashed down hard on her right hip. A gasp of pain burst from her throat. The barrel of the Sif banged on the floor and the weapon flew from her fingers. The nauallis flinched, but kept up his steady, careful pace toward the outer room.
"Anderssen, quit playing about and get up," he hissed.
Gretchen tried to rise, but her hands slipped on the mirrored floor and she spun helplessly. One boot hit the wall and skittered away. Even as she groped for some kind of purchase, she saw a spreading reflection of grayish light spill across the slanted wall. The butt of the Sif hit her head. Gretchen twisted into a roll and flopped over onto her stomach. Grasping fingers closed around the weapon and her boot struck the wall square enough to stop abruptly. She looked up.
Hummingbird had backed past her in his flat-footed crouch. The little gun was pointing into the strange gray light, absurdly dwarfed by the bulk of his gloved hands. Gretchen twisted her head around and her eyes went wide. Reflex twitched the Sif into aiming position.
The passage was filling with a steady gray radiance. An indeterminate crepuscular color shone from the air. The doorway to the room of the sea had vanished in the endlessly repeating reflections of the mirrored walls, floor and ceiling. Where the gray existed, there was nothing else – no shadow, no stone, no edges or divisions. Gretchen realized, with a chill start, the light was moving rapidly toward her, spilling along the passage in a colorless tide.
"That's not light," she shouted into the comm, trying to scrabble backwards along the mirror-bright floor. The lead edge of the radiance was almost touching her flailing boots. Her finger twitched on the firing bead of the Sif. "It's something else!"
Hummingbird's answer was drowned out by a sharp blast. The shockgun rocked against her shoulder as a canister burst from the muzzle. Gretchen oofed and the recoil flung her down the hallway, legs and arms windmilling. She slammed into Hummingbird and they both flew back through the slanted doorway into the outer chamber. Behind them, a high-pitched z-z-zing ended in a blast of flame and light. Out of the corner of her eye Gretchen caught sight of the gray radiance rippling and twisting like a torn blanket in the strobe-light eruption of a hundred and sixteen individually packaged munitions.
In a cloud of dust, Anderssen untangled herself from the nauallis, hands working the reloading mechanism. Gretchen felt the heavy, solid thunk of a new canister levering into the firing chamber. Hummingbird scrambled up from the spreading dust as well, half-blinded by his disordered kaffiyeh.
"Clever," he barked sarcastically over a comm channel hissing with static and the same kind of high warbling wail Gretchen had heard in the cave on Mount Prion. "You must have done well in physics… Ai! Run!"
Gretchen was still raising the shockgun to cover the tunnel entrance when the nauallis bolted for the archway leading into the canyon. A shout of dismay strangled in her throat as the radiance boiled out of the passage. She caught a brief, fragmentary glimpse of a cloud of rock chips, bits of metal and what seemed to be frozen flame suspended within the advancing gray.
"Crap!" Gretchen sprinted for the doorway and leaped through the opening, hands protecting her head. The roar of static in her earbug was deafening and she slapped the comm off. Both feet hit the dust, sending up twin plumes of heavy yellow. Staggering, Gretchen ran across the bowl and scrambled up the tilted slab on the far side.
In the darkness, she lost sight of Hummingbird among a jerking, disorienting blur of canyon walls and sandy cavities among glassy-smooth boulders. Damning his cowardly name, she slid across another slab and dropped down onto a wide, gravel-strewn moraine. Wheezing for breath, Gretchen jogged up the slope and at the top she turned, nervous hands checking her belt, the sling of the shockgun, her rebreather – all the tools she needed to survive. A cough died in her throat.
The radiance had spilled out into the canyon bottom. Now, from a distance, the thing looked nothing like any light or illumination she'd ever seen. Strikingly, there were no shadows or reflections cast by the color. Instead, the already dark canyon dimmed as the shape grew among the boulders and flooded from the doorway. Gretchen adjusted her goggles, but there was no change save in infrared, where she hissed in surprise to see the edges of the formless gray merging with the subzero night while bright points of heat blazed in the center of the mass. But even those sparks were dying as she watched.
"Oh, no," she whispered, backing up. The Sif was in her hands again, but Anderssen realized with a grim certainty the gun was useless. The fading heat sources were the still-exploding flechettes she'd fired into the color, being avidly consumed by this…this…"What is this thing? Hummingbird!"
There was no answer on the dead comm. Gretchen turned and ran as fast as she dared, scrambling past rounded anthracite boulders and slogging through deep drifts of sand and dust. A hundred heartbeats passed and suddenly, as she dodged between two menhirlike stones, a pair of powerful hands seized Gretchen and swung her aside, into a pocket of shadow in the greater darkness. She yelped, swinging the stock of the Sif around in a sharp blow to the unseen figure's head. The honeycombed plastic thudded into something solid. A glowbean flared to life and Gretchen found herself facing a wincing Hummingbird.
"Where…" Anderssen tried turning her comm back on. "…have you been? What is that thing in the canyon?"
"A hungry dream," Hummingbird said, though the staccato warble and keening in the background of the channel nearly drowned him out. "Or rather, what a current at the edge of the valkar's dream made in this waking world."
"A dream?" Gretchen fought against a fierce desire to smash the butt of the shockgun repeatedly into the man's face until he made sense. "Dreams don't have form, idiot bird! They don't eat up explosive munitions like toasted maize and come looking for more!"
Hummingbird pushed the muzzle of the Sif away from his face with a fingertip. "Even dreaming, the valkar distorts the world with the weight of its presence. Even these dead stones retain some memory of a once-living world." He slapped a gloved hand against the glossy obsidian rising up above them. "Nothing survived the devastation intact. But you saw the effect Russovsky's stone had on the organism in the cave – even the pattern memory of an often-used artifact could stir the formless to take shape. This world is rife with parched, formless memories."