Gods of Pangaea: Lost on the Last Continent, #3

By John C. Wright

Colonel Preston Lost didn't think of himself as reckless. He believed in preparation, proper equipment, and patience in stalking the prey. But, in reality, he was not a cautious man. Having followed a spaceship into the black storm clouds above the Bermuda Triangle, he flew through a time portal to the end of days and crash-landed on Pangaea Ultima with few supplies and no way of returning home.

 

Lost now finds himself embroiled in a battle for dominance of not only the world, but all of time as well, and he is forced to concede that—just perhaps—he is a little reckless after all.

 

The Eighth Men have come, bringing the Fifth Men and all of their First Man fighting slaves, to conquer Threno, the City of Swift Death, and they have come with overwhelming force. Their dreadnought alone would be sufficient to defeat the entire Corsair Navy, and they have more. Much more.

 

The only things Lost has going for him are a broken-down machine from countless eons past, a whispered prophecy from an Atlantean girl, and his hope that the Watchers' will err. It's not much, but Lost really wants to kiss the girl at the end of the battle, so he'll have to find a way to make it work!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theogony Books
• Release date: Nov 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781648550096

Book preview

Chapter 01 Mu, Kumari, Polaris

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Colonel Preston Lost, some two hundred fifty million years after his birth, had been awake for three of the twenty-five-hour-long days of this more slowly turning world, preparing a desperate defense. The final battle was at hand, but hope was not.

A strange power to speak all languages had been granted his tongue, a catlike night-vision his eye, and an unending ability to shoot bullets already shot had been given his Mauser pistol and his elephant rifle, a magnificent Holland & Holland. On his finger was an eight-sided magic ring that could decrease the force of gravity acting on him, or pull him toward a defined, particular spot. One of those spots was focused upon one of his never-ending bullets, and it had led him here, to Threno, the City of Swift Death.

That gun was not in his hand, and he missed it dearly. He had bartered the fabulous weapon to Grind Goldtooth, one of the seven Corsairs of Threno, in return for the liberty of Cynisca, the comely princess of long-lost Atlantis. Her he loved, but she was promised to marry another. Goldtooth, pleased, had assigned Preston a post as his First Mate and given the planning for the defense of Threno into his hands.

The previous First Mate, a man named Raad, demoted, watched the doings of Preston with an envious eye and a sly, bitter smile.

Another thing Preston did not have was the Tesseract which had brought him into this era. The Tesseract maintained the time-vortex which the dwarfish and gray-skinned Eighth Men used to kidnap victims from Preston’s home era. Tales of goblins kidnapping maidens from the Middle Ages, as well as urban myths about UFO abductions, were not myths after all. Preston had pursued one of these saucer-shaped slave ships through the time vortex and crash-landed here.

The Eighth Men, and all the imperial forces of the world-conquering Fifth Men, the giant allies of the gray dwarves, misled into believing the Tesseract was in his possession, had remorselessly hunted him from mountaintop to buried city, through caverns to woodlands, from stratospheric plateau to pathless prairie, from slave camp to swampland to the pirate sanctuary.

The Empire had wrecked whole aerial fleets and lost countless fighting men in the pursuit, seeking Preston to recover the precious, all-powerful Tesseract. But where was it?

And now the World Empire of A.D. Two Hundred Fifty Million was sending all its forces to the city an ancient technology prevented them from approaching. Here seven gangs of pirates and cutthroats, escaped slaves and outlaws, had gathered. From this safe base, they flew their airy clipper ships to plunder the shipping of the Empire.

The Empire of the Mighty Ones had tolerated this nest of raiders and robbers. Until now.

In the gray, gloomy hour before dawn of the third day, when only the earliest birds piped their uncertain notes, a flare of light burned for a bright moment between the riverbank and the city gates down below, around the largest block of the city which formed the foundation of the column-shaped city of Threno.

The skulls set in the grim circle that surrounded the base of the city were briefly illuminated when some luckless soldier, not a First Man, stumbled in the dark across the deadly, unseen boundary marking the range of the Swift Death.

In that flash was revealed the scene. Above, a ceiling of cloud, dark and without star or moon. Below, a wide area of grass and shrub between the massive, dark, pyramidal base of Threno and the banks of the river. The armies of First Men janissaries from the fortress city of Xurac Phthia were crossing a long bridge of floating pontoons which had been thrown across the river in the night. The pontoon bridge was bowed out by the whitewater current, forming a great curve which, at its midpoint, almost touched the lip of the waterfall. Moving silently and without lights, more than half had already taken up positions around the base of Threno.

Beneath the city wall, numberless as ants from an upturned colony, the horde of warriors stood revealed, weapons gleaming, terrible banners waving. Tens of thousands of men under arms were here—it was more than the whole population of Threno.

With a great cry and brazen blare of horns, the men of the Empire rushed the walls.

It was not to be a siege after all.

In the uppermost reaches of Threno were several cubes of black stone, a hundred yards to a side, suspended impossibly in midair without support. Here sat the platform holding the aerodrome of the Corsairs and several mansions with roofs of stone or pavilions with walls of silk.

The Tosspot, Captain Grind’s wood-hulled, three-masted sloop-of-war, was hovering at anchor in the shadow of a vast overhanging block. The two levitation rings cannibalized from wrecked Watcher vessels were affixed to the port and starboard in vertical drums, looking like odd paddlewheels. The vessel had a keel like a sea plane, designed for water landings.

To her right and left, hanging beneath other vast black cubes, were the Reprisal and the Happy Fortune, the warships of Captain Pheleg the Feugian and Captain Satavaesa of the Second Men. The Reprisal was a wooden torpedo shaped like a swordfish, over forty feet long, with a single lifting hoop it carried in a vertical drum, wider than the hull, at the stern. She was tipped with a ramming prow. The Happy Fortune was a larger, slower vessel. She consisted of three lifting hoops connected by a latticework of carved and painted braces, with a myriad of wings and sails both above and below her single deck.

When the flare of light and blare of horns announced the assault, the gray cloud overhead was disturbed, and spines, spears, and shafts of gleaming crystal and pots of fire began to rain down like hail. Glassy spheres as large as cannonballs burst on impact into knife-sharp shards, electrocuting those they touched—a non-explosive grapeshot.

Burning oil and electrified grapeshot fell to either side of the blocks, and any pavilions and wooden structures built on the upper surfaces were aflame, but the aerial ships hanging close beneath were untouched.

Preston, binoculars in hand, stood on a goose-necked observation platform cantilevered beyond the rail of the Tosspot. To Preston, a man who had survived the flame and thunder of endless mortar shells, rolling bombardments, and airstrikes in the muddy trenches and dark tunnels of the final, terrible assault on Shanghai, the near-silence of this bombardment of latter-day weapons seemed eerie.

He saw derelict sailors or drunk roughnecks gathered on the high balconies of pubs and cathouses. The Widow had ordered these establishments closed for the duration, and now their disobedience had a terrible price—cut by shrapnel, impaled by a glassy splines, or licked with flame, they were cast from the balcony as it collapsed. Below them on the city-pillar, a half-nude serf bearing a load was trapped between spreading fires on a swaying rope bridge between two horns of the towers of Threno. The bridge parted when it was struck by the plummeting bodies of the sailors and the flaming debris with them, and all fell screaming into the still, dark air. These were the first casualties of battle.

Meanwhile, the first rush of men had crossed the open field between the main host and the foundations of Threno. The bottommost tiers of the vertical city were shaped like a vast, stepped pyramid, hundreds of yards on each side, rising up in four courses. There were great doors of bronze, twenty feet high, set in a tunnel opening in the lowest course like a giant mouth. However, this base did not rise to a point, but instead held up the myriad vast blocks of the vertical city. The sea-wall grew out of the spine of this pillar city and ran back toward the canal wall.

Captain Grind loomed behind Preston. He had been pointing to the enemy formations and saying their names and histories. Ah! Now they charge! He put a spyglass to his eye. Look! The Watchers send in their oldest fighters first. It is their habit: they assume whoever is older is weaker.

At first, foolishly, Preston assumed Grind meant the Watchers were sending in greybeards first, because the figures below, at least seen at this distance in the bad light, seemed like tall men with white hair, running amid groups of dogs. But then he blinked his night vision into effect, and saw the picture clearly.

A large group of ape-jawed, hirsute men was in the forefront, running on all fours, carrying in their mouths truncheons of bone or dirks of sharpened antler. Their wolf skin ponchos made them easy to mistake for dogs in the dim light.

On their flanks were groups of dark-skinned pigmies with straight, dark hair, dressed in uncured skins and armed with tomahawks, flint-tipped javelins, and sharpened bullroarers. This was a simple weapon Preston had never seen before—a heavy flint blade on the end of a line. It was shaped to make an eerie, low-pitched sound when spun, but could be flung with greater force than any mere overhand throw.

Bringing up the rear were the figures Preston had mistaken for old men. They were seven or eight feet tall, with long, pale, flowing hair falling unbraided down to their belts or boots. They had beardless, narrow features, and flesh of starkest white. The main mass of this company was armed with crossbows or atlatls, but their front rank carried poleaxes and large, oval shields of hide painted with rayed disks or triskelions. Their limbs were hidden in long, shining garments bedecked with belts of precious stones. These gems flickered and flared with sparks, slaying any who attempted to grapple them, as if each figure were armored in an unseen electrified fence.

Preston saw their stride and posture as they strode forward and loosed a flight of javelins. Those albinos are women!

Captain Grind gestured at their battle banners. See their solar emblems! I know them. Not women! But then he spoke in a strange, chanting voice, as if he were reciting a lesson. Behold the hermaphrodites of Mu, Naacal women altered to have the strength and stature unnatural to them. Firstling civilizations of India, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and the Mayas were merely the decayed remnants of Naacal colonies.

Grind then gestured at the men in wolf skins running on all fours. Again he chanted, as if repeating a memorized phrase. Behold the troglodytes of Gnophkeh. They were driven from the Polar Regions by the heroes of ancient Lomar, who collapsed their painted caves and covered over their blood-soaked sacred pits to rear up many-templed Olathoe atop. The route back to the sullen, underground warrens of K’n-yan was blocked. The man-eaters fled to Catalhoyuk in Asia Minor, where they built a great city with no footpaths nor streets, with walls shared with neighbors. Each entered his home down a trapdoor in his roof, and no young left home until he learned to scale stone wall and roof beams. They buried the bones of their grisly feasting beneath their floors, decorating the skulls of particularly succulent children with beads and ochre.

Finally, he pointed with his spyglass at the dark-haired, dark-skinned men. "Behold the Kumari, whose huntsmen ranged the lands reaching between Madagascar and Indochina. When the Lemurians came, armed with Vedic chants and bronze weapons, all their tribes vanished in a single night, preferring suicide to slavery.

"An era later, the whole land broke and sank away, destroyed by the power Pashupatastra turned upon its wicked wielders."

Then he laughed and spoke in his normal voice, "The accursed Lemurians are gathered there, in the reserves, in boar-tusk helms, armored with ringed bronze scale, tridents of thunder, and arrows of fire that multiply themselves in flight. Damn their eyes!

But these three first companies, they are weak. The Fifth Men seek to test our mettle. Grind pushed the covered lantern of the heliograph into Preston’s hand. Well? Will you not give the signal? The men have been drinking. They will not wait forever.

Preston squinted at them. How the devil do you know so much about extinct First Men races?

Grind laughed loudly and pointed in the distance. "That is my cousin Quiyahuitl, who owns the Naacal and trains them for battle. Tetli and Xipil are my step-sister’s uncles. Tetli commands the troglodytes and serves the weak or disobedient as meat dishes for the feast table, boiling them in their own mother’s milk. Xipil feeds the Kumari on honey, lotus blooms, and peaches from his own trees. Pork they eat only before combat.

Ichtaca of Ometeotl is a more distant relative. I never had to sit through his long, dull talks about his fighting slaves, the Lemurians, so I do not know their weaknesses, curse him! We breed First Men as a dog breeder his thoroughbreds. What else do you think my people boast about and bet on?

The fight was joined. Howls, screams, and roars rang out as the front rank rushed the obdurate face of the titanic column base of Threno. The rough blocks, deeply incised with ancient trigrams and adorned with gargoyle spouts, offered generous handholds for the troglodytes. They swarmed up, rapid as simians climbing a tree.

Call the Swift Death upon them!

Preston said, Remember what I told the council. The Lethal Deterrence Unit will not hurt any First Men. The power cube inside the Widow’s tower can only broadcast inside the city limits, unless its little mechanisms, which are smaller than dust motes, are carried inside something it can burn for fuel...

The first level of the stepped pyramid formed a wide shelf or tier. Here waited a company of corsairs, roughnecks and scallywags in rags and officers in helmets, milling without discipline, forming no ranks. They were armed with ax, cutlass, and pike, and midmost stood a picked company of sailors in leather coats armed with spline guns.

They were greatly outnumbered by the beast-men, for the troglodytes were as thick as swarming ants as they came up the wall, but they could not come quickly. Bone knives were futile against the long pole-arms, and axmen with ease could split the skulls of any brute clawing his way up the wall. Preston could hear the corsairs roaring with mad mirth. Meanwhile, the Naacal of Mu ran straight into the open tunnel mouth that led to the great metal doors of Threno. Preston heard the high-pitched screams and saw the leaping redness of the many casks of burning oil and molten pitch poured through murder holes in the tunnel ceiling, and he heard as well the noise of stone blocks dropping.

Now! bellowed Grind.

Why? called Preston. We are winning.

That’s the problem!

For as the screaming Naacal, shining robes afire and silk hair ablaze, came racing from the tunnel mouth, casting their weapons away, Preston heard the metal echo of those doors being flung open, and the shouts and battle cries of an unruly group of armed partisans chasing after. This was the militia of Threno, a body composed of men too young or too old to serve aboard a sky ship and levies raised from indentured servants promised freedom if they fought well. They had no uniforms, merely bandannas or neckerchiefs of one color or another to show their company and rank.

Ichtaca of Ometeotl, hearing the commotion, raised a flag. As the militia men emerged from the protection of the doors, the swift Kumari closed on their flanks, whirling their knife-tipped bullroarers like buzz saws, and the Lemurians launched arrows into their midst, which exploded into flame and replicated their numbers in mid-flight, forming an ever-growing flaming cloud of shafts numerous and bright. The men below were blotted from Preston’s sight, and only their screams told their fate.

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Chapter 02 Warlords of Ages Lost

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The roar of the militiamen, hard on the heels of the fleeing Naacal spear-maidens, now turned to screams, as the preternatural arrows of the Lemurians fell among them. These arrows in midflight split into additional shafts, as solid and real as the first—an insolent abrogation of the law of conservation of mass.

The arrowheads ignited in flight and exploded on impact, but no smell of gunpowder or napalm rose up to Preston’s high perch. This was some alchemy dating from years when the rest of mankind was trapped at a Neolithic level of progress, from a land mass in the Indian Ocean, lost with all her kingdoms, all her secrets.

Preston swore and flashed the signals he had so recently learned. The trumpeters blew the retreat, to no avail.

From left and right, the pygmies of Kumari fell among the militia, and, although each lusty foot-soldier could maim two pygmies with every blow of cutlass or bludgeon, and kill eight or nine before he fell beneath their dark blades of knapped flint, they were outnumbered ten to one. The mass of militiamen, roaring, shouting, bleeding, and dragging their wounded with them, tried to pull back into the tunnel mouth leading to the great doors—to no avail.

The Naacal amazons, reinforced by Kumari pygmies and brutish Neolithic troglodytes, now formed ranks in the tunnel mouth and blocked their way with poleaxes, flint blades, and dirks of antler horn. The Naacal would fall under a wooden truncheon or spear, but a metal cutlass cutting into their electrified robes slew the slayer with a thunderclap. The way back was blocked.

Help came from the wall above the great door. A squad of sharpshooters in leather coats stood there, with their strange, spline-shooting spear guns shaped like harquebuses. These harquebusiers were dour Second Men, part of a band who had joined the corsairs with Captain Satavaesa, and who had bled on the stone of the Lethal Unit to be granted immunity from the Swift Death.

They shot their splines point blank into the heads and shoulders of the climbing horde. The splines broke in midflight, forming pairs, trios, or half a dozen smaller darts of glass, impaling more than one of the close-packed bodies with every shot. They did not laugh, but they used up the splines in their quivers with alarming speed.

When the Kumari pygmies beset the corsairs from the gates, the sharpshooters used up more splines thinning out their numbers. They could only fire down into the rear ranks of the attackers, since the fore ranks were commingled with the corsairs.

At the same time, trumpets sounding the advance rang out over the clamor of the battle, and the Lemurian warlords in their shining breastplates of bronze scales marched forward in step, singing their battle chants, and their forward ranks formed a wedge before them, flourishing tridents and lances that glowed with strange energies.

Preston said, We can never win this, even with all my tricks. I do not even know what their weapons can do, what their range is, or...

Grind slapped him playfully on the back, knocking the wind from his lungs, so Preston could not finish the sentence. Screw your manhood more tightly to your groin-sack, lad! The Widow has faith in you, enough to kill you by slow torture if you fail, so you must not fail! I have a large wager resting on the outcome. Those Lemurians in the front have spearheads of the eighth metal artificially grown in lodestone mountains, which is galvanized with azote and a choleric humor of earth-current. Their range is about the same as a fulguration scourge.

Preston stared. He had been in battles before, and the prospect of losing men did not petrify him, but each time he saw a cutthroat or blackguard among his men do some bold deed of carnage, he found his affection for them growing, and each death was more bitter to him than the last.

More militiamen poured out of the gates and directly into the mass of fighting Naacal amazons. The warrior women fell screaming beneath the bludgeons and cutlasses of the corsairs, and blood pools began to soak the grass, which was trampled into mud. But even the fallen amazons could slay, for if any man touched their shining garments with hand or metal blade, an unseen shock tossed his jolted body to the ground, stone dead.

Stick to the plan, you idiots! Preston hissed.

The reinforcements had been scattered when they erupted from the tunnel mouth, for the Naacal maintained their formation and stood as a wedge to split the charge. The reinforcements could not retreat, for more corsairs behind them were pressing forward, eager for battle and booty. Half fell among the pygmies and were stabbed with knives of stone, and half fell among the troglodytes and were stabbed with knives of elk-horn.

Then more shafts from the Lemurians fell, each archer releasing a fusillade, uncaring whether foe or allies were smitten. Fire and smoke hid the scene from Preston’s eyes as he looked down.

Release the Swift Death! said Grind.

Not yet, Captain, said Preston through clenched teeth. Not yet.

He looked toward the main force of the enemy, which was still held in reserve. Units were still marching across the floating bridge. The enemy grew stronger. Dawn was also coming over the highlands overhead, and pink light painted the upper cliffs with haunting hues.

Before Threno were twenty thousand First Men soldiers. Another ten thousand were gathered at the far bank of the river in the shadow of Xurac Phthia, waiting to cross. These warriors were preserved from every forgotten and unknown nook of history, strangely armed with weapons from Preston’s future as well as his past.

And beyond the known range of the Swift Death, gathered on the riverbank, or hovering in shiny disks amid the low clouds (slowly turning from gray to pink), were races that arose after the extinction of Preston’s species of hominid.

Here were long-necked and sad-eyed Second Men, gigantic Fifth Men with skulls like domes, slender Seventh Men with owl-winged cloaks, eerie and silent Eighth Men. These Eighth Men, called the Watchers, were like nude children, pale as mushrooms, big-headed, with eyes as large and dark as the eyes of devils. These were the ministers and servants of the Advocacy, whose power dominated Pangaea.

And Preston had wagered all to defy them...armed with what? A broken-down machine from countless eons past, a whispered prophecy from a girl from Atlantis he loved, and his hope that the foe would err. It was not much.

He saw a broad platform hanging above the river, held aloft by glittering cables beneath half a dozen levitation disks. The broad, high shapes of Fifth Men loomed there, looking over the heads of trumpeters and signalmen with semaphore, and many ranks of archers. Two of the Mighty Ones raised their luminous wands, signaling the trumpeters to blow.

The mass of foemen now marched left and right, spreading to either side up and down the river bank, and moved to encircle as much of the great pillar-base of Threno as the sea wall running north from the city’s spine would permit. In the gap thus formed, came a thousand chariots.

Some were pulled by utahraptors, toothy bipeds like miniature tyrannosaurs, running on ostrich-legs. Others were pulled by prehistoric miniature horses called merrychip, harnessed in twin rows like a dogsled team. At least one was pulled by a tall pair of robotic legs, awkward but swift pistons of brass and oakwood, with the tongue of the car lashed to the hips of a machine that ended at the torso. The charioteer’s reins ran to rings and controls at the hip-joints.

Grind pointed, My cousin Xoxoctic owns them. These are Zoroastrians from the City of Irem of the Pillars, a walled paradise of silver and gold built by Shaddad, son of Ad, scented with ambergris, watered by many fountains, and rich with fruit trees in their courtyards. They worship the Good Mind as Supreme God, but he smote the city and buried it in sand, and all those not carried off by the Watchers perished without grave or gravestone. Their iron chariots are passed down from father to eldest son, since the ore to build another is so rare. Xoxoctic uses whalebone sheathed in micro-diamond polymers to repair broken struts or wheels.

The chariots came midmost. These were enameled baskets of metal on wheels, set with carven plaques, carrying a driver and a lancer, who was also armed with a recurve bow of horn. Spikes jutted from the wheel hubs.

The Lemurian warriors were on the right flank of the chariots, with strange energies glowing and pulsing on the tines of their tridents, advancing at a quick march. On the left flank, half-naked men were brandishing their spears and gnawing the edges of their shields. Their hair was blond, long, and tangled. Their eyes were wild, red-rimmed, and blue. Their skin was daubed with stripes and swathes of blue paint and white chalk. Bear pelts of brown or black were slung across their shoulders.

Preston focused his binoculars. He saw the blond, blue-stained men grasping blades or driving them into their chests or abdomens, but they were miraculously unhurt. One man pulled red-hot, flaming coals from a lit brazier. He chewed and swallowed them, unharmed.

When the trumpets rang, the bear-skin wearers sprinted in an unruly mass, stabbing each other for sheer fury. They were as swift as the charging chariots.

"Now look! Behind the Iremites come contemporaries of yours—the woad-painted berserkers of the Witch-City of Ys, submerged in a single hour in the sea! They follow the reanimated corpse of Dahut, their druidess and queen! Ah, I would have wagered on them had I known they were in this battle. The Ys are more like Fifth Men than First. They are owned by a sewing circle of old women