Numenera - Torment, Tides of Numenera - From the Depths, Bk 4 (Blue) - The Last Days of Archopalasia.pdf

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From the Depths: Blue
The Last Days of Archopalasia
by Tony Evans
Table of Contents
Chapter 1................................................1
Chapter 2................................................6
Chapter 3..............................................12
Chapter 4..............................................18
Chapter 5..............................................25
Chapter 6..............................................31
Chapter 7..............................................41
Chapter 8..............................................48
Chapter 9..............................................56
Chapter 10............................................62
Chapter 11............................................67
Chapter 12............................................73
Chapter 13............................................79
Chapter 14............................................83
Chapter 15............................................90
Chapter 16............................................95
Chapter 17.........................................102
Chapter 18.........................................110
Chapter 19.........................................116
Chapter 20.........................................125
Chapter 21.........................................133
About the Author..............................139
From the Depths: Blue
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Chapter 1
“Sage Reen!” gasped Teylen as he burst into my laboratory. “A stranger! Come see!”
One tries to be patient with one’s assistants. One really does. But it becomes
diicult when they have all the grace and forethought of an aneen in rut, and when
one is in the middle of a complex and vitally important experiment, and when one’s
dying wife is in the next room and desperately needs her rest.
I admit it. I snapped.
“Can you not keep it down, you brick-footed imbecile!” I hissed. “I’ve just this
minute got Kyria to sleep, and now you’ve likely woken her up all over again!”
Teylen bowed like he was having convulsions. “So sorry, Sage. So sorry. But a
stranger! And he’s come—”
“Quietly, I said!” and glanced back at the curtained doorway that separated my
work area from my wife’s day room. “You really must learn to adjust your enthusiasm
to the importance of the situation. Screaming at the top of your lungs should be
reserved for moments when the roof is on ire, or the Iron Wind is approaching, or
raiders. The appearance of a stranger, while admittedly rare this far from civilization,
could have been communicated to me in a normal tone of voice after a polite knock at
the—”
“But, Sage,” he burbled. “He came from the east!”
The rest of my admonition died on my lips. To the east of Camp Gnoseus was the
Tempest Waste, the vast and barren hellscape that I had been studying and exploring
for these last twenty ive years. Nothing ever came out of the Tempest Waste. Nothing.
“Impossible,” I said at last. “There is nowhere east from which he could have
come.”
“I know, Sage,” said Teylen. “Nevertheless, he has.”
There was a whisper of cloth behind me and I turned. Kyria had pushed aside the
curtain and was leaning in the bedroom doorway in her robe. She looked as beautiful
and fragile as a pressed lower.
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“Why don’t you go see, Reen?” She smiled. “Aren’t you the one who always says,
‘Save impossible until you have all the facts?’”
I hurried to her and took her around the shoulders. “My dear, you shouldn’t have
gotten up. Come back to bed. I told Teylen he was shouting too loud.”
She chuckled softly and patted my arm. “It was you scolding him that woke me,
beloved. You really must learn to adjust your anger to the severity of the offense, eh?”
I lushed. Kyria was always poking holes in my hypocrisy and bluster. It was one of
the reasons I loved her. She was among the rare few with the courage to stand up to
me when I lew into a tirade.
“Forgive me, my dear. You are correct as usual. I will try to tear his head off more
quietly next time.”
She clutched at me for support as I lowered her into the bed, and her ingers
accidentally touched the scar on my back. I linched. She winced.
“Oh, Reen. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. Never mind. I woke you. You poked me. We’re even, eh?”
She kissed me on the cheek. “Go see the stranger, then come back and tell me all
about it.”
I kissed her back. “Most assuredly, beloved. Most assuredly.”
***
I arrived at Skotoko’s lock-up sweating and gasping for breath, my chest and legs
aching from trying to match Teylen’s pace. The inconsiderate stripling seemed to have
forgotten that, since my collapse a few months ago, I had promised Kyria I would be
careful about exerting myself, and here the boy had me running clear across the camp
like a man half my age.
Skotoko, a glaive and former mercenary, was my chief of security at Camp
Gnoseus, a scarred and glowering tower of a man, capable of turning unwanted
visitors away with nothing more than a scowl and a roll of his door-wide shoulders. He
gave me a salute as I leaned against the lock-up porch and panted.
“He’s inside,” he said. “But I don’t know if you want to go in. He looks...plagued.”
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“Did...” I took another breath and tried again. “Did you touch him? Did you bring
him inside?”
“No, no. He walked in and I ran out. The smell was...” He shook his head. “Tempted
to burn the place down and build a new one, rather than go back in.”
“No need.” I held up a lat card attached to my vest, one of many artifacts I carried
for my work. It glowed a faint yellow. “This alerts me to any such threats. If the man
was infectious, it would have started glowing purple or green the moment he came
within a kilometer of the camp.”
Skotoko grimaced. “I don’t trust those old gadgets. I’d rather rely on my nose and
my gut.” He shrugged. “But you’re the boss.”
***
Skotoko was right about that. I am the boss—Reen Gnoseus, founder and chief
researcher of Camp Gnoseus, the research station I set up here twenty-ive years ago to
study the phenomenon known as the Tempest Waste and the vast variety of numenera
to be found within it. Now it's a bustling little community of about thirty, mostly
contract prospectors, who pay me to be allowed to dig for the valuable cyphers and
devices that are found only on my claims, and which I was the irst to discover and
ind uses for. The rest are the cooks and drivers and guards like Skotoko who keep it all
running and safe. There is also my wife, a naturalist of some repute; my fellow
researcher and camp medic, Shwyr, who is also an accomplished nano; and myself. We
are the ones who do the actual researching and cataloging. Oh, and there’s Teylen too,
of course, my idiot apprentice.
Skotoko was also right about the smell. The reek of rotting lesh as I entered the
lock-up hit me like a hammer, combining with something stranger and more gut
churning, something acrid and chemical. At irst I couldn’t ind the source of the stench
in the dim interior, then something that looked like a pile of dirty rags shifted in a dark
corner.
“H-hello?” I said. “Are...are you human?”
The rag pile slowly unfolded itself to reveal the horribly disigured face of a man.
His rotting lesh seemed to be melting from his bones, and he was covered in weeping
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