Read Online The Devil Delivered and Other Tales by Steven Erikson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Erikson
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A pool, viscid in shades of blue, magenta, bottle-fly green. Pale round waterbugs swam dizzying circles beneath the surface. Damn things didn’t even need air anymore. William straightened and took a few steps backwards.
He removed a flare from his belt, activated it, and tossed it into the well.
Fire! A pillar of poisonous flame! He watched it eating a vertical path skyward. A sudden eye glares upward, and meets the steady polished eye of a satellite. They study each other, then wink with their own designs.
I anoint this dead-ground, absolution of its sins burning into oblivion, whilst the scarabs beneath the surface of a dead skin race down into cool darkness, and there await the coming of their first breaths. Savage oxygen, the lungs that birth the cough of flame.
I see you all come closer, drawn by this crisp cut to the air, this clean crackle which my dying hands have cast into the well of darkness.
Gather, then, while I bathe. When I emerge, you will be able to touch me, and I will be able to touch you. Our spirits will join, and we will march like a sea that swallows the earth. We will march, and none may stop us. Ghosts, we are all ghosts now. We must deliver the new world unto the inheritors, who know us not.
The dead-grounds are alive once again.
Behold this self, Daniel. I am Mene before the feast.
The water was like ice against his skin, as close to pain as he could remember. He carefully reattached the clasps on the rotting bootsuit, and scanned the ruined farm with new eyes.
The farm’s battered arrogance had fallen in upon itself, and now the air was filled with ghosts, the streaming dead still mute but brimming with their separate stories. All eyes rested on him.
He would be their language, their words, now. He understood that much. He would speak for them all. God had given him the lie, laid bare and bleeding. We have lived in our heaven, and we have made it as it is. Somewhere above, the fallen angels still climb.
William stared at his hands. His sight had changed. The bones stood out sharply, solid in a fading haze of mortal flesh. Blood pulsed through the capillaries, faintly glowing.
He retrieved his backpack and stiffly worked his way into the straps. The pillar of fire had been sighted. Satellites, high-altitude reconnaissance craft. Activity in the Hole. Pinpoint resolution, down to the water trickling from his hair. As attentively as these ghosts, machines watched him, recorded his movements, then dutifully reported the data. Still, the heat sensor records would baffle the analyzers. Around him flowed an ice age, there in the breath of beasts dead for ten thousand years. They are my body, Daniel, and I am their voice.
His joints protested dully as he lurched into motion. Knees refusing to bend, balance awry, tottering and jolting forward, stalking like a stiff marionette.
The ghosts closed in, flowing and brushing against him, bolstering him upright with their gelid shoulders, broad wintry backs. Nearby, he saw a coyote and recognized it.
“I remember you. The last hunt. Bison antiquus . I see you keeping your distance, friend.” The words were in his head, but so was everything else. No borders left, his skull porous, his thoughts drifting in the air, delicately traced by the satellites, and heard by the coyote.
“You’re too old,” William said, “for mere trickery. You were here and you were there, on the edge of that continental bridge. You watched our arrival. Did you know what it meant? Did you know then what it always means, friend?”
But the earth yields to the shovel, and is turned over, flipped onto its back. Again and again, this is what we do, and each time, the firmament fills with spirits departing the old ways. We move on. We never look back.
The coyote dropped back, then behind, into his wake. Ready to pick at the pieces, prepared as ever to contemplate the scatter of garbage, the meanings of the twisted tin can and the candy wrapper, the crushed velvet of
He removed a flare from his belt, activated it, and tossed it into the well.
Fire! A pillar of poisonous flame! He watched it eating a vertical path skyward. A sudden eye glares upward, and meets the steady polished eye of a satellite. They study each other, then wink with their own designs.
I anoint this dead-ground, absolution of its sins burning into oblivion, whilst the scarabs beneath the surface of a dead skin race down into cool darkness, and there await the coming of their first breaths. Savage oxygen, the lungs that birth the cough of flame.
I see you all come closer, drawn by this crisp cut to the air, this clean crackle which my dying hands have cast into the well of darkness.
Gather, then, while I bathe. When I emerge, you will be able to touch me, and I will be able to touch you. Our spirits will join, and we will march like a sea that swallows the earth. We will march, and none may stop us. Ghosts, we are all ghosts now. We must deliver the new world unto the inheritors, who know us not.
The dead-grounds are alive once again.
Behold this self, Daniel. I am Mene before the feast.
The water was like ice against his skin, as close to pain as he could remember. He carefully reattached the clasps on the rotting bootsuit, and scanned the ruined farm with new eyes.
The farm’s battered arrogance had fallen in upon itself, and now the air was filled with ghosts, the streaming dead still mute but brimming with their separate stories. All eyes rested on him.
He would be their language, their words, now. He understood that much. He would speak for them all. God had given him the lie, laid bare and bleeding. We have lived in our heaven, and we have made it as it is. Somewhere above, the fallen angels still climb.
William stared at his hands. His sight had changed. The bones stood out sharply, solid in a fading haze of mortal flesh. Blood pulsed through the capillaries, faintly glowing.
He retrieved his backpack and stiffly worked his way into the straps. The pillar of fire had been sighted. Satellites, high-altitude reconnaissance craft. Activity in the Hole. Pinpoint resolution, down to the water trickling from his hair. As attentively as these ghosts, machines watched him, recorded his movements, then dutifully reported the data. Still, the heat sensor records would baffle the analyzers. Around him flowed an ice age, there in the breath of beasts dead for ten thousand years. They are my body, Daniel, and I am their voice.
His joints protested dully as he lurched into motion. Knees refusing to bend, balance awry, tottering and jolting forward, stalking like a stiff marionette.
The ghosts closed in, flowing and brushing against him, bolstering him upright with their gelid shoulders, broad wintry backs. Nearby, he saw a coyote and recognized it.
“I remember you. The last hunt. Bison antiquus . I see you keeping your distance, friend.” The words were in his head, but so was everything else. No borders left, his skull porous, his thoughts drifting in the air, delicately traced by the satellites, and heard by the coyote.
“You’re too old,” William said, “for mere trickery. You were here and you were there, on the edge of that continental bridge. You watched our arrival. Did you know what it meant? Did you know then what it always means, friend?”
But the earth yields to the shovel, and is turned over, flipped onto its back. Again and again, this is what we do, and each time, the firmament fills with spirits departing the old ways. We move on. We never look back.
The coyote dropped back, then behind, into his wake. Ready to pick at the pieces, prepared as ever to contemplate the scatter of garbage, the meanings of the twisted tin can and the candy wrapper, the crushed velvet of
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