Wasteland of flint

the color. Instead, the already dark canyon dimmed as the shape grew among the boulders and flooded from the doorway. Gretchen adjusted her goggles, but there was no change save in infrared, where she hissed in surprise to see the edges of the formless gray merging with the subzero night while bright points of heat blazed in the center of the mass. But even those sparks were dying as she watched.

'Oh, no,' she whispered, backing up. The Sif was in her hands again, but Anderssen realized with a grim certainty the gun was useless. The fading heat sources were the still-exploding flechettes she'd fired into the color, being avidly consumed by this…this…'What is this thing? Hummingbird!'

There was no answer on the dead comm. Gretchen turned and ran as fast as she dared, scrambling past rounded anthracite boulders and slogging through deep drifts of sand and dust. A hundred heartbeats passed and suddenly, as she dodged between two menhirlike stones, a pair of powerful hands seized Gretchen and swung her aside, into a pocket of shadow in the greater darkness. She yelped, swinging the stock of the Sif around in a sharp blow to the unseen figure's head. The honeycombed plastic thudded into something solid. A glowbean flared to life and Gretchen found herself facing a wincing Hummingbird.

'Where…' Anderssen tried turning her comm back on. '…have you been? What is that thing in the canyon?'

'A hungry dream,' Hummingbird said, though the staccato warble and keening in the background of the channel nearly drowned him out. 'Or rather, what a current at the edge of the valkar's dream made in this waking world.'

'A dream?' Gretchen fought against a fierce desire to smash the butt of the shockgun repeatedly into the man's face until he made sense. 'Dreams don't have form, idiot bird! They don't eat up explosive munitions like toasted maize and come looking for more!'

Hummingbird pushed the muzzle of the Sif away from his face with a fingertip. 'Even dreaming, the valkar distorts the world with the weight of its presence. Even these dead stones retain some memory of a once-living world.' He slapped a gloved hand against the glossy obsidian rising up above them. 'Nothing survived the devastation intact. But you saw the effect Russovsky's stone had on the organism in the cave – even the pattern memory of an often-used artifact could stir the formless to take shape. This world is rife with parched, formless memories.'

Hummingbird stopped, tensing. Gretchen turned, hefting the Sif onto her shoulder, muzzle down. Gun useless, she thought with very faint amusement. Make a note for Bandao. Good for feeding colorless light.

'I was very foolish to come here – Hsst! Something is coming.'

Outside their tiny shelter, the gloom in the canyon – barely disturbed by the thin ribbon of brilliant, unwinking stars high above – deepened. Gretchen fought down a desire to bolt from their meager shelter. Hummingbird's fist closed on her shoulder in painful counterpoint to the static roaring in her earbug.

The color was there suddenly, gliding out from behind a house-sized boulder. Again the gray radiance did not extend beyond an indistinct, wavering shape. Gretchen's eyes widened, taking in a burning-hot point drifting within something like a bifurcated cone with a forest of tentacular legs moving restlessly beneath. She focused her goggles on the hot centerpoint and saw a flechette tumbling in place, hissing and spitting slow fire. The metallic sheathing was rapidly disintegrating. Apparently unaware of them, the color drifted past, a gray cutout against a flat velvet background.

Hummingbird's fingers clasped her wrist and the comm channel fell silent. He leaned close, pressing his mask against hers. 'We have to get away from here or we'll be fuel too.'

Nodding, Gretchen peered out around the corner, saw nothing – no wavering, indeterminate blotches of lightless color – and slipped out, weaving her way through the debris scattered at the mouth of the canyon. Hummingbird was right behind her.

Heedless of what might see them – if the color had eyes or something passing for an organ of sight – they ran up the broad, open slope flanking the entrance to the slot. Anderssen immediately started wheezing again. Her leg muscles sparked with pain and she nearly collapsed at the top of the ridge. Hummingbird caught her arm, dragging Gretchen to her feet.

'Run,' he barked, voice a barely audible squeak in the thin air. 'Don't -'

Gretchen looked back, trying to catch her breath.

Amorphous gray shapes were emerging from the mouth of the canyon. Not all were cone-shaped – some shifted and distorted in the brief moment of her glance – and others strode swiftly on long, stalklike legs. A sensation of hostile desire struck Gretchen like a physical blow, though at such a distance there should have been no way for her to ascertain expression or intent.

She turned and ran, head down, forcing cramping legs and thighs to bound across rocky, uneven ground. Hummingbird loped at her side, keeping pace, though Gretchen guessed the old man could easily leave her behind.

They were within sight of the cave – she could see both ultralights outlined by a soft glow against the night – when a gray shape raced past on dozens of insectile legs and spun to face them. Hummingbird drew up as Gretchen stumbled to a halt, surrounded by a drifting cloud of dust and gasping for air. She looked around only seconds later and the radiance was all around them in shimmering, pearlescent sheets. A trickle of cold pure fear in the back of her throat made Gretchen's teeth clench.

Hummingbird settled back on his heels, shifting his weight on the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Gretchen was suddenly struck by a sense of his calm solidity. Does anything disturb him? she wondered wildly, fighting to keep from swinging the useless gun toward the enemy. The sight of the terrible gray hanging in the air made her feel weak and small and powerless. Is he ever afraid?

'Tla xihualhuian,' his voice echoed over the comm, woven into a rising and falling storm of static and queer shrieking wails. The nauallis's hand extended, clenched tight into a fist. Grains of newly-crushed powder dribbled into the dark air. 'Tlazohpilli, Centeotl! Ticcehuiz cozauhqui yollohtli. Quizaz xoxouhqui tlahuelli, cozauhqui tlahuelli!'

The Mйxica's voice grew stronger with each syllable. Gretchen's distracted comprehension slid away from the barely-understandable words. They were in a strange, archaic-sounding dialect – she recognized a few of the words – yellow and green and wrath.

'Do not move,' Hummingbird said, the sound of the chant still ringing in his voice. 'Become still.'

Gretchen stared at him in horror. The nauallis was settling to his knees, back straight and shoulders square. Around them, the belt of the gray was advancing through the air like ink spilled into clear water. The bright points of heat were gone. In infrared the malicious cloud had faded almost to invisibility. Her heart hammering, Gretchen forced incredulous words between clenched teeth.

'Are you insane? They're going to drink us up like a sponge! Get up!'

'No.' Hummingbird placed his hands on both knees, eyes invisible in shadow, his face a faintly gleaming mask of dim fire. 'Let them come…'

'Never,' Gretchen snarled, swinging away from the old man. Before he could react, she sprinted away, aiming for a space where the drifting radiance seemed thinnest. At the same time, her finger squeezed the firing bead on the Sif and there was a tinny crack as another flechette cylinder accelerated down the fat barrel and soared away into the night sky.

Anderssen tried to leap the curdling indistinct color but failed, plowing through a thin drifting sheet. Immediately, she felt a chill, numbing shock. Gretchen staggered, nearly twisting her ankle on a hidden rock, then caught herself and fled. Gray clung to her legs and torso like the shredded remains of a gauze quilt or a thin paper banner. Against her black cloak and z-suit, the color shimmered pale and lifeless – fish scale without rainbows, a dead iridescence – but did not fall away as she ran. Cold blossomed in her side, cutting through the layers of insulation and radiation shielding built into the suit.

Off in the distance, the canister blew apart, filling the night with a bright, sharp blossom of red and orange. Hundreds of tiny explosions followed, the paltry air robbing their roar and clamor of its full-bodied rage. A twisting cloud of sand and grit billowed up into the black sky, lit from below by the fading reflection of the explosions.

Gretchen managed another twenty strides and then collapsed with a thin, despairing cry. A cloud of the omnipresent dust puffed up around her. Color dripped from her legs and stomach like fresh steam rising from a still-unfrozen lake in a high country winter. Muscles spasmed, clenching tight within her skin. Blinded by needlelike pain, Gretchen tried to force her legs and arms to move, but wave after wave of nervefire crushed her down into the