The Barsoom Project

One of the shadows fluxed. It concealed an angle which had seemed convex until Hebert’s foot moved across it. Then it was no angle at all; it was a black gap, and Hebert’s foot was in it, and Hebert was still descending. Then it was too late.

Hebert scrambled for purchase, eyes mad. Ollie tried to get down to him, but it was to no avail.

Hebert didn’t cry out. Even at the moment of death he kept control, knowing that the sound of a scream would betray them all.

And then he was gone.

“Mistake,” Max said nervously. “He made a mistake.”

Orson looked back over his shoulder. “Test the ground. Test the ground at every step.”

“Too late for Hebert,” Eviane muttered.

Ollie tested the ground where Hebert had fallen through. There was no ground there, just the illusion of solidity, and a shadow that seemed too dark to be entirely natural.

Cautiously, Ollie moved around it.

Three!

They had lost three in as many hours. It made them nervous. They slid down the side of the defile, testing those odd, hallucinogenic angles one after another, staying in the shadows, ever closer to the place of Robin Bowles’s torture and imprisonment.

They reached the smoke hole without incident. And paused, as the music fluxed, and Robin Bowles screamed again.

The stone throbbed beneath Eviane’s feet. She could hear the chanting, and she could feel the moans of agony. What were they doing to Bowles? She remembered those sounds-deja vu-but she had no image of what was going on. Just the deep, terrible dread.

She bumped into Yarnall’s foot, and swallowed an “oops.” He touched a finger to his lips, then scooted sideways so that she could move in next to him.

There was a spot where the stone slabs parted to make room for a rising column of smoke. From time to time the pulse of smoke ceased, and then Yarnall shielded his eyes and looked down into the hole.

He pulled his head away, struggling against a retching cough. “I can’t see a thing,” he whispered as another soul-tearing scream vibrated the stones.

Charlene reached into her backpack, extracting a pair of snow goggles. She whispered, “Here, try these.”

Eviane adjusted the strap, and snugged the glasses down over her eyes. She touched Yarnall’s shoulder to move him out of the way, and peered down.

For a few seconds, she couldn’t see anything. Then the smoke began to shift.

Every few seconds she turned her head away from the hole to pull in a breath of fresh air, and then looked back down. Slowly, slowly, she began to place the objects and events in the ancient temple below.

The room functioned as a qasgiq of sorts, perhaps even the one seen in their earlier vision.

There was a circle of men and women around a central fire, and there was something else.

Stretched out on a lateral framework, writhing in torment, was-the corpse of Robin Bowles.

Oh, he was dead, all right, Eviane knew that much. A low fire cast hellish orange shadows on the walls, illuminated the proceedings to show her more than she wanted to see.

Robin Bowles’s corpse was stretched spread-eagled on the rack, and his internal organs very carefully removed. A cavernous hole gaped in the middle of his body. One of the men sitting in the circle stood, and reached into the corpse. He wrenched free a handful of glistening red, and cast it onto the fire.

Eviane gagged. The wind changed, and she accidentally inhaled a rancid whiff of sickeningly sweet smoke.

The man spoke. “Interloper!” he said. “You who came to break our power. Your soul is ours now, and I command you to tell us everything.”

Robin twisted on the rack as if he was still alive, the bonds cutting into his already red and raw wrists.

“Told you. Told you.”

“No!” the Cabalist thundered.

“Everything. Everything.”

Eviane pulled her head away from the hole, breathed a few gulps of clean air, and then hazarded another peek. She recognized the man this time. It was Ahk-lut, the son of Martin the Arctic Fox. His dark, scarred face was twisted and gaunt.

Now that she thought of it All of them looked sick.

Her tendency was to mark that down to the unspeakable evil of their practices. But now, looking at the twelve members of the Cabal, she saw that one and all seemed spent, sickly, and diseased, as if each had paid some ungodly price for the necromantic gifts and powers they coveted.

The leader reached into Robin’s body and chanted something so low that she couldn’t hear it and then he twisted…

Robin screamed. She hoped never to hear another such scream. She slid back against the rock slab, panting. Yarnall pulled her goggles away from her, and donned them, hanging over the smoke stack to hear what was going on.

“Aiiiee!.. ” Robin sounded like a soul dragged over the coals. “All right. All right. All right.”

The leader’s voice was smarmy with self-satisfaction. “Good. Speak. What could have given you enough power to overcome our bathers?”

“We… my companions carried magic of our own.”

“Magic? Greater than the sky-metal?” There was a general hush of anticipation, and Eviane heard herself saying: