 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
surface, reached up a hand and trembled for help.
The shadow creature slid across the ground, fighting the winds that had grown stronger in
the night, back to the soft place that had been their pit, to the hand thrust up through the powder. It
grasped the hand, and Stack’s fingers tightened convulsively. Then the crawling shadow exerted
pressure and pulled the man from the treacherous pumice.
Together they lay against the earth, fighting to see, fighting to draw breath without filling
their lungs with suffocating death.
“Why is it like this...what happened?” Stack screamed against the wind. The shadow
creature did not answer, but it looked at Stack for a long moment and then, with very careful
movements, raised its hand, held it up before Stack’s eyes and slowly, making claws of the fingers,
closed the four fingers into a cage, into a fist, into a painfully tight ball that said more eloquently
than words: destruction.
Then they began to crawl toward the mountain.
6
The onyx spire of the mountain rose out of hell and struggled toward the shredded sky. It
was monstrous arrogance. Nothing should have tried that climb out of desolation. But the black
mountain had tried, and succeeded.
It was like an old man. Seamed, ancient, dirt caked in striated lines, autumnal, lonely; black
and desolate, piled strength upon strength. It would not give in to gravity and pressure and death. It
struggled for the sky. Ferociously alone, it was the only feature that broke the desolate line of the
horizon.
In another twenty-five million years the mountain might be worn as smooth and featureless
as a tiny onyx offering to the deity night. But though the powder plains swirled and the poison winds
drove the pumice against the flanks of the pinnacle, thus far their scouring had only served to soften
the edges of the mountain’s profile, as though divine intervention had protected the spire.
Lights moved near the summit.
7
Stack learned the nature of the phosphorescent strings excreted onto the plain the night
before by the batlike creatures. They were spores that became, in the wan light of day, strange
bleeder plants.
All around them as they crawled through the dawn, the little live things sensed their warmth
and began thrusting shoots up through the talc. As the fading red ember of the dying sun climbed
painfully into the sky, the bleeding plants were already reaching maturity.
Stack cried out as one of the vine tentacles fastened around his ankle, holding him. A second
looped itself around his neck.
Thin films of berry-black blood coated the vines, leaving rings on Stack’s flesh. The rings
burned terribly.
The shadow creature slid on its belly and pulled itself back to the man. Its triangular head
came close to Stack’s neck, and it bit into the vine. Thick black blood spurted as the vine parted, and
the shadow creature rasped its razor-edged teeth back and forth till Stack was able to breathe again.
With a violent movement Stack folded himself down and around, pulling the short knife from the
neck-pouch. He sawed through the vine tightening inexorably around his ankle. It screamed as it
was severed, in the same voice Stack had heard from the skies the night before. The severed vine
writhed away, withdrawing into the talc.
Stack and the shadow thing crawled forward once again, low, flat, holding onto the dying
