3. Ill Hunt

I can answer what I know of the origins of the Tombs in a long breath or two.

The Tombs are older than the world, or, at least, older than the life-craft, which is the only part of the world of concern to the Phastorlings.

The Tombs are ancient beyond any surviving record. Of course, my people keep no records, and neither did the Nymphs who ruled the world before us, nor (once the Clade system was introduced) do we share information between Clades. Before the Nymphs, there is some dim lore of pre-Natural-type creatures, humans or humanlike, who had not yet domesticated all living things to human use: Chimerae and their Kine, Witches and their Moreaus, Ghosts and their Savants, and other legend-beings. They were human, but controlling so little of the biotic world, and making so few modifications or adaptations to their nervous and muscular and glandular systems, that they can hardly be called human at all. In that sense, the Tombs are older than biocivilization.

The Tomb structures themselves are not alive, as our houses and burgs are—ah, were. They have some sort of mind, but the defensive systems are based on energy, fire, iron, stone, and none of our poisons or disease-bearing microbes have any effect on the iron doors. Our finest wasps cannot dig through; our strongest mastodons cannot break through.

Not just me and my warband, or, later, my Clade, but many of us in many parts of the Endlesswood besieged the Tombs, and slew the weak and sick who tried to escape our culls.

There is a legend, of course, that to disturb the Tombs risks waking He Who Waits, who is the first man buried there, and the eldest patient. His voice will rise from the ground, and demand, “Is it yet, the aeon?” and “Is she come, my bride?”—and if there is no answer, many voices will cry out, “Let no man waken He Who Waits, lest his wrath awaken!” and all the soldiers of forgotten ages will rise up from the mausoleums and crypts, and with their forgotten weapons of forgotten science, lay waste the Endlesswood.

I know the legend to be merely words, for no such voices spoke, and only the cadre of men set in hibernation in and about the doors woke when we besieged the Tombs.

What is the Endlesswood? It is the world-forest. Since yours is a world of ice, I must explain that at one time this ground on which we stand was beneath tree cover, so ancient and so vast that trees two hundred feet tall and two thousand years old were considered saplings.

No, I do not know what part of the world this is. Nor does it matter: one world-forest of interlinked arboreal life reached from Antarctica through Patagonia, across the Isthmus of Mexico to Laurentia, across the Bering land bridge to Angaraland, Sino-Korea, Kazakhstania, Baltica, and Eurafrica as far north as Fennoscandia and as far south as the Madagascar peninsula. The sempivirens was the main form of the world-forest, and the breeds were biomodified to grow in the glacier of Antarctica and melt it, or in the Sahara and water it. In this way, the Phastorlings proved they could match the wealth and accomplishments of ancient men who ruled a rich and golden world, back before the Giants arose.

A black squirrel could run from one hemisphere to the other and never touch the ground, and so could a squad of hunting leopards sent out by the Iatrocrats. We grew our wigwams, mansions, and burgs from the same ecological niche as orchids and lianas, organisms that grew out of trees. In the branches and crotches of the larger trees we grew plantations and arbors and groves whose roots also never touched the ground, and whose leaves never saw open sky, nor drank sunlight undimmed by endless canopy above.

The only break in the endless world-forest surrounded the great doors of the buried Tombs, for the roots of the eternal trees could not break the armor, and not take deep root. When one traveled from branch to branch, each broader than a canal, one would come of a sudden across a glade, and the trees would form a great circle surrounding a place of blinding sunlight and species of grass that grew nowhere else on the world. It was an empty place, like a lake or little sea. The blue sky that only canopy-dwellers saw reached down almost to the ground there.

There were not enough diurnal creatures living at ground level to be adapted to grazing of these grasses, and ground-level monsters departing of the forest would be dazed and maddened by the sunlight. So in these glades, and nowhere else, the eternal war of predator and prey was halted, and peace reigned. For that reason we Phastorlings called the groves accursed, and the donors knew the doors to the lands of the slumbering dead were near.

The doors were the escape from our world into a lower world, an invitation to escape our world and our Way, and that we cannot permit. So we watched and warded and slew those who drew near.

Yes, we fought to prevent our sick or wounded or hopeless or helpless from reaching the Tombs and entering hibernation.

The biological material of the sick belonged to us, you see, and preserving the weak through hibernation and hope of medicine was against our Way. Why should a crippled man with a perfectly good set of lungs, liver, heart, or other glands be allowed to take such treasures from us? And bury them! Inefficient, ineffective! If he is done with his organs, we harvest. If he is done with his meat, we feast. If the sickling is a woman afflicted by disease, but her womb is still sound, we rape.

Our art knows how to keep the womb alive long after brain and limbs are dead and dismembered, and the other organs harvested. The Hermeneutic-Gargantua genus among us uses this method to produce scions, for we neither marry nor are given in marriage, we neither age nor, save by violence, die, and so our generations are not born, but made. The Clades and the donors arrange things otherwise, but such is the Phastorling way.

But we learned through hard lessons that there was a limit to the Tomb leaguer. If you killed a sickling too close to the doors, the doors would open fire. From deserters and survivors of other bands—like I said, we did not swap information—I also learned that beforegoers and ancient ones risen from buried coffins and dressed in bright armor would from time to time behold the hunts of man-prey and feasts of man-flesh before their doors, and make a sortie or sally, slaying whom they encountered.

We had to set our picket line far from the doors. A mile was safe, two miles was safer, safest of all was to make sure the sicklings were too sick to reach the doors at all: it was the custom to introduce venom into hunting cats to drive them rabid and drive the cats by instinct-lock into the terrain circling a Tomb, or impregnate the smallest nits and mites and midges with fevers of several deadly strains, and send them as clouds to hang before Tomb doors, for the energy-cannon of the most ancient world could not open fire on a crowd of flies or a clowder of cats.

4. Interment

My own interment into the Tombs? It was unremarkable.

From time to time the sicklings, acting in a fashion unlike ours, or using a mental discipline unlike our Wintermindedness, would do the one thing we never do, which is, they would take antihistamines and allergy suppressants, so that they could tolerate one another without their bodies reacting, and many donors or dwellers from different Clade could mingle.

They would form—there is not really a word for it in our language. The Nymph word for it is orgy, but this implies a union and a cooperation for sexual purposes. You know how pack animals act as one, or a hive of bees, or army ants? It was like that. A man-pack, a man-hive, a man-army.

Of course, such a unity of purpose, even across difference of Clade, each taken from a different point on the biological spectrum—such a thing is unheard of by those who follow the Old True Way, the astru-do, the way of the omnicompetent and utterly isolated man. But, hoo! The sicklings were robbing the Clade of the organs they carried, so why would any other taboo hold them in check?