Moon Sea Marauders - Pt8
Steampunk serial
Previous chapters: Part 7 Part 1
The Crystal Caves of Qal’th.
I will freely admit that had I known the depth of the madness that lay ahead of us that day, and in the months to come, I would perhaps not have been so keen to venture forth into this subterranean lunar kingdom.
With French musket fire falling upon us from the distant crew, we were quick to make our way off the cliffs and into the crystal forest itself which lay before us. I found myself lost in the sight of these strange crystals as they reared above and around us, impossibly large and filled with eerie light, and had it not been for the rough hands of Master Brighton restraining me I might fully well have wandered off into the cavern’s depths and never been seen or heard from again. So deep was I in thought that the ruckus and chaos of the fight seemed entirely beyond me, at first - until Master Brighton intervened and brought me firmly back to reality. He pulled me back from aside a cluster of particularly vivid crystals mere moments before a volley of French musket fire cracked into the same spot which I had occupied, and his harsh words - and the sight of the newly pockmarked crystal flanks - served to sober me up quite rapidly after that.
Captain Devworth, quick on his feet and even more nimble with his plan, rapidly split the men of the Poseidon into three groups, and led one of these groups on a flanking run off to the one side of the cavern. The second group split off in the opposite direction, dodging around the otherworldly growths and disappearing from sight within moments - and that left only us, the third group. Composed of only a handful of marines and the survivors from Absolution Point - Sir Cottonby and his small retinue amongst them - our task was to stay put and draw the attention of the onrushing Frenchmen, which we managed quite admirably. A musket was thrust into my hands at one point, and after aiming at one of the approaching shapes, I pulled the trigger and promptly found the fierce recoil deposing me on the cavern floor amidst a carpet of smaller crystals and loose pebbles. Needless to say, marksmanship would never be my forte, and after that ill-chosen action I stayed low and tried to make myself small behind a particularly large segment of crystal while the muskets barked and the crystal forest shivered and reverberated around us.
The onrushing crew of the Daphne were almost upon us when Captain Devworth and his men made themselves known again, and a withering volley of musket fire, at barely spitting ranges, tore through the French ranks just as they were about to cross the final streamlet separating us from their approach. Men flopped and screamed in the smoke that blew across the battlefield, and as much as I was enamoured - and confused - by this increasingly alien landscape, a part of me was secretly glad that this, this battlefield of flesh and blood - this was something that I recognized, and could actually compare with my previous experiences on the Nile and in Crimea.
With the French crew defeated, we started moving amongst the wounded to render what aid we could, and it was at this point that the situation became markedly more strange than it had been before - a state which I had not assumed possibly prior to that! A first tally of the bodies revealed that we had faced only a double handful of Frenchmen, and while they had put up a fearsome noise in their assault, it was clearly not the entire crew of the Daphne. There were only two survivors, of which only one could speak, and even as I tried to staunch his wounds, Captain Devworth started questioning him in French about the rest of their crew, and, more importantly, the whereabouts of Lady Jessica.
The second element of strangeness was how these green and yellow crystals from the cavern had responded to our presence. Many of the crystals had darkened noticeably, losing their eerie illumination and turning almost grey in response to musket balls and bodies that had slammed into them, and this change - this dimming - was spreading throughout the rest of the cavern in a slow wave. Where crystal touched crystal, the fading of the light spread, until a significant portion of the cavern had fallen into darkness by the time I finished my ministrations on the wounded Frenchman. We were forced to light torches again at this point, standing as we were in the epicenter of the final battle, and it was in the glimmering of the torchlight that the final, most eerie change of all was noted.
The crystals had started to absorb the blood of the fallen.
Like ink dropped into a beaker of clear water, so too the blood that had been spilled was being sucked into the crystal surfaces upon which they had fallen - although the mechanism of this absorption was not of any scientific process that we could fathom. Crimsons and scarlets swirled with hypnotic rhythms in the depths of the greyed, inert crystals, the blood of the men pulling into the interiors of the crystals in slow, steady streams, and there was a matching wave of muttering and unease from the men of the Poseidon until Captain Devworth steeled them with some hard words.
Our quarry remained ahead of us, with the primary focus of our efforts - the rescue of Lady Jessica - yet uncompleted, and thus we had to continue, regardless of any misgivings or superstitions which might have started blooming in our minds at that point.
It was at this point, at the end of the captain’s questioning of the Frenchman, that we also learnt the name of this place: Qal’th, or so it was said by the wounded man. It was a name unfamiliar to all present, and when we asked the French mariner what the name meant and where it came from, he merely pointed deeper into the cavern.
Qal’th.
An alien name for an alien place.
We left the scene of the battle, the fallen bodies stacked aside but unable to be buried due to the hard ground which floored the cavern, and set out to find the rest of the Frenchmen. We passed through what appeared to be a camp of theirs in short order, lean-tos and canvas tents erected between the trunks of the vast crystals that towered overhead, and in the darkness which surrounded us - for the crystals were still grey and dull, and the cavern itself was slowly succumbing to more darkness - it was an eerie thought to imagine oneself living in a space such as this for any extended period of time. Where had their food come from, or their firewood for cooking? Had they even prepared for that, giving the constant temperature this deep under the surface? Had they lived from the water that streamed around us, silent and dark now that the luminescence had fled?
It was only when we found the refuse pits that they had dug, and the streams that had been forded with crudely carved crystal blocks, that it became clear that this was not the first time the French had been here. Whatever plans these raiders had, they must have been in motion for long before they descended upon Absolution Point, or the settlements of the Sea of Serenity.
The rear of the cavern was another cliff-like expanse, the ground rising sharply in thin terraces of grey stone and now-dulled crystal to the roof far above, and as we followed the simple footpaths which the French had left behind from their previous journeys we soon found the steps which had been hewn into the side of this ascending stone flank. Much alike to the stairs which had first brought us down into this cavern, a new set of rough stairs now took us upwards, and at the top we found another ledge and another tunnel. Here, as before, the otherworldly murals waited along the flanks of the tunnel, revealing more bizarre creatures and landscapes, and there was a strange feeling of symmetry when I looked across the breadth of the cavern we had just passed to spot, in the far distance, the selfsame tunnel which had led us into it not so many hours before.
Was this symmetry intentional? Was this the architecture of Qal’th, whose strange name still circled through my mind? I do not think we will ever know, but I will state this: we - driven hard by Captain Devworth’s words and will - passed through four more of these caverns, eerily similar in their soft radiance and forested crystalscapes, before we finally, at the end of our journey, found ourselves reaching the naked lunar surface again - where the French, now numbering only twoscore or so, were fleeing across the snowy landscape ahead of us.
Of Lady Jessica, there was still no sight.
Next chapter: Part 9
The cavern is so freaky. Also are they in a mirror world now?