Fechlon - Part 1
Thomas materialised twelve feet above the ground.
He had just enough time for his eyes to register huge towers of greenery reaching up around him like vertical jungles above a carpet of dense, impenetrable forest and then he was falling. His last sensation was that of Parcellius's hand being torn out of his and the sound of someone's horrified, hopeless scream. He hit the ground hard and heard the brittle sound of his leg breaking, and then his head hit a lump of fallen rubble and everything exploded in pain...
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Consciousness returned slowly. He was vaguely aware of low, concerned voices coming from somewhere nearby, and he was encouraged to recognise Matthew, but he couldn't tell what he was saying. Only that he sounded worried. So, at least Matt's survived, he thought, and at least one other person, for him to be talking to someone, but what about the rest?
There was a pounding pain in his head that made it difficult to think, but he was able to remember that they'd appeared above ground. They could just as easily have materialised below ground, or within a solid object. Teleporting blind, he thought in wonder. We teleported blind, without even a look in a scrying mirror at our destination! Without even a clear idea in our heads about where we were going, except that it be the surface of the planet! His mind reeled at the magnitude of the risk they'd taken, and at how lucky they were to be alive. Some of them, at least.
Then Matthew saw that he was awake and hurried over to his side. Thomas tried to focus on him, but he was suddenly finding it hard to remain awake. His eyelids were heavy and it took a real effort to keep them open. It would have been so good to just slip back to sleep. To just let go and drift away...
He knew he couldn't hide in unconsciousness any longer, though. Matthew's evident anxiety suggested that they were still in danger, in which case they'd need his help if they were to find a way home. He forced his eyes back open, therefore, and was greeted by the blurry, unfocused sight of Matthew's face peering down at him in concern.
"Tom!" he cried in joy. "Thank the Gods! You're okay!"
"Am I? Oh good." He made himself lie still for a few moments longer, knowing that he'd be overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness and nausea if he tried to sit up too soon. This wasn't the first time he'd recovered consciousness after a blow to the head, after all. It was something with which he had some experience. He gave himself a count to ten, therefore, but black spots still swam before his eyes as he slowly and painfully raised himself up on one elbow. That couldn't be helped. They'd go away in time.
"Tom!" said the soldier again. "We've got to move. We can't stay here. Do you think you can get up?"
Getting up was the last thing on his mind. All he wanted to do was lie there for the rest of the day. Perhaps several days. If Matt said he had to get up, though... He made the effort, using his legs to push himself up, and that was when he remembered that one of them was broken as a lance of pain shot through it. He cried out, but Matthew's hand was suddenly across his mouth while he looked fearfully across to his right.
"Please try to keep quiet," he hissed. "I know it hurts, but it's really important you try not to make any noise." He took his hand away, and helped the wizard carefully to his feet.
Thomas's left leg had been splinted with a sturdy tree branch lashed in place with strips of leather cut from someone's jacket. The ends of the broken bone had been set, he found, and he was grateful to have been unconscious when that had happened. Waves of dizziness swept over him, but he forced them down and concentrated on his surroundings, leaning against the soldier for support as he did so.
They were in a small glade of crushed and bent grass surrounded by larger shrubs that blocked his view of anything beyond them. Above them he could still see vertical walls of greenery broken in places by patches of bare, flat rock. They looked like areas of scrubland that had been picked up and stood on their edges. The gap between them was like being at the bottom of a deep canyon. There was a strange regularity about the canyon walls, though. They were perfectly straight, perfectly vertical and had the entrances to square caves at regular intervals, making them look almost like…
Realisation came to him in a shock of recognition. They were buildings! Colossal buildings, ruined and empty and reclaimed by nature. Covered by greenery where seeds and spores had found gaps in the stone, eventually becoming inhabited by the full range of wilderness life.
The canyon had once been a wide street, he realised, and looking across at its far side he saw long armed apes swinging around from branches as wide as a man’s thigh hundreds of feet above the ground, hooting and howling at each other. Lower down he saw a huge flock of white birds perched in the windows. They all leapt into the air in synchrony to pour across the sky in a vast grey cloud as they sought to escape from something that had alarmed them.
Each building was vast, he saw. As large across the base as an Agglemonian castle but reaching hundreds of feet into the air. The size of the windows suggested that the people who had inhabited them, an unknown number of centuries in the past, had been human in size, though. Possibly the same people who had built the ring that arched across the sky above them in a graceful silver arc. Perfect and smooth and showing no trace of the decay and death they knew it contained.
The other two soldiers, Jop Sonno and Roj Villa, were peering through the shrubs at something beyond, and Thomas could see from the set of their bodies that they were afraid, as if some powerful and dangerous enemy were camped nearby. They appeared unharmed, as far as he could see, apart from a bandage around Roj Villa's arm. That reminded him of Matthew, and he turned back to his friend, eyeing him up and down for signs of injury. He had a nasty bruise on the side of his head, he saw now, and a crust of dried blood along the line of his jaw, but other than that he seemed unharmed.
"Where are the others?" he asked.
"Drenn's scouting the area," the soldier replied. "He'll be back any time, though, and he told us to be ready to move out immediately. Our survival could depend on moving fast. He wants us to move out to the north. He seems to think we'll be safer that way, and he's in no mood to be argued with."
"He's taken charge, then?" asked Thomas.
"I've got no problem with that. He seems to know what he's doing, and as a priest of Samnos you can bet he's seen a hell of a lot more action than we have. We're damned lucky to have a man like him with us." He paused. "Saturn's group's nowhere around. Drenn says they could be anywhere on the planet."
Thomas nodded. "Teleporting blind, there's no reason we'd end up in the same place. It'll be a miracle if they're even within a hundred miles of us. They'll find a way to contact us, though. Saturn can use a Farspeaking spell to talk to us, and use the connection to home in on our location."
"If he's still alive," replied Matthew. "If he could do that, wouldn't he have done it already?"
Thomas looked at him in alarm. "How long was I out?"
"Quite a few hours. It was early morning when we, er, landed. Now it's well into mid afternoon."
"He may be low on magic," suggested Thomas. "There's not so much of it here as back home so it may take him a while to recover. He'll contact us when he's had a chance to sleep and study his spellbook." That reminded him of his own spellbook and he checked his pockets, relaxing in relief when he found it there, safe and sound.
"If he's still alive," repeated Matthew. "You're always telling us how dangerous blind teleporting is."
"Yes, well, let's not think about that, shall we?" He nodded towards the other two soldiers, regretting it instantly as another wave of dizziness swept over him. "What's going on? What are they looking at?"
"This planet's not quite as dead as the ring," the Flight Leader replied. "Apart from all the wildlife, there are people down here. Very hostile people. We've been attacked once, but we managed to fight them off. They withdrew over that way a little, and now they're just waiting."
"For reinforcements?" asked Thomas, his eyes widening.
"That would be my guess. It's what Drenn thinks, anyway."
As if summoned by his name, the priest of Samnos chose that moment to reappear. "You're up, good," he said to Thomas. "I think there's a way to the north, if we move carefully and quietly. Come on."
Matthew nodded and called softly for Jop Sonno and Roj Villa to join him. Matthew then put an arm around Thomas, supporting him on one side, and the wizard hobbled painfully alongside the soldier as Drenn led the way out.
Something was still wrong, though, and after a moment Thomas realised what it was. "Parcellius!" he gasped. "Where is he?" He looked around as if expecting the alchemist to appear from the shrubbery, apologising for his absence, but there was no sign of him. Not even his dead body. "What happened to him?"
"Look up," said Matthew grimly.
Thomas stared at him, then followed his gaze upwards. They were standing near the base of a ruined building, he saw. A great towering wreck of a building hundreds of feet high. Once it must have been a single, monolithic block of stone, steel and glass but now it was topped by spires and turrets where the upper storeys had crumbled away leaving only the strongest support pillars behind. He searched the empty windows, thinking Matthew must mean that Parcellius was in the building, but then he saw a strange looking shape a dozen or so feet up, almost lost in the greenery. Seemingly attached to the wall. Looking strangely like the head and upper body of...
"Gods!" he gasped in shock. "Oh Gods!"
"He lived for nearly two hours," said Matthew, his face pale with the remembered horror of it. "He was begging us to help him, but there was nothing we could do. It was his cries that drew the locals..."
"But we don't blame him for that," interrupted Drenn sharply. "Any normal man would have cried out as loudly. Even you."
"Yes, of course," agreed Matthew, looking peeved. "I wasn't suggesting..."
"Poor man," said Thomas, shivering with shock. "What must it be like, to materialise half inside a solid object?" The memory flashed back; the ground so far below him. The alchemist's hand pulled out of his grasp as he fell... He remembered the scream... He felt consciousness threatening to fade again as he contemplated the alchemist's horrible death. Two hours! Gods!
He shook himself back awake with an effort. No time for that, he told himself. I'll need my wits about me if we're to get out of here.
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