She inspected them, her squad, before moving out. Six of them, the entire contingent who had once been on display in an art museum in New York. Two of them had painted faces like Ptolemy, though the renditions were pretty crude by comparison. The rest were truly ancient mummies, their tattered wrappings stained with bodily fluids and rotten with time. Here and there a length of withered forearm or a gruesomely dried-out glimpse of cheek poked through their unkempt linen.
Sarah picked one of these relics for point and handed him a machete. He wasted no time but moved steadily into the trees surrounding the landing zone, his arm flashing back and forth like a pendulum, his blade clearing out undergrowth, chopping through tree roots, splattering his bandages with thrown tree sap. The others clustered up tight behind him with Sarah and Ptolemy taking the rear. It was hard work keeping up with him. They were on the side of a mountain, a rugged side that had never been developed, which might never have been touched before by human hands. Sarah's gloves tore and snagged every time she reached for a tree root to haul herself up and her boots skidded on the precariously-balanced talus of the slope. She started to sweat, even though the snow all around her reflected a cold sunlight that made her face sting. Her nose began to run and she was instantly miserable with having to snort up the snot or wipe it away with her sleeve every ten seconds. She tried to just let it run but that was excruciating'every nerve ending in her face was red and raw with the mountain air.
She needed to think. She needed to plan her next move. Yet all she wanted, all her body strained to do was go back, back to the helicopter. She had so much more to say to her father. Most of it vicious. She couldn't do that, though, not now. She had committed to violent action and she had to stay in the moment, stay on the path. It was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.
In time'she could not have said how long it had been and in fact she wasn't wearing a watch, but it was still daylight'she reached up and found a piece of stable rock and pulled and dragged and cursed her way up until she was doubled over the top of a ridgeline, her legs on one side and her face on the other. She looked up and saw the mummies standing on the rocks like mountain goats or Sherpas or something else that can climb mountains really well. Between oxygen deprivation and sheer exhaustion she lacked the strength to curse them.
When she had stopped wheezing and was merely panting, when she had wiped the sweat out of her hair and shaken most of the pine needles out of her clothes she saw that Ptolemy was pointing at something. She followed his linen-wrapped finger and nodded. The Source was beneath them, now, down in the hollow of a valley below. She blinked her eyes. Her arcane vision was almost dominant so close to the energy supply'it was hard to see things in normal, visible light.
When her eyes did clear she found herself looking down into a modest bowl in the side of the mountain, a semi-circular valley about a hundred and fifty feet straight down the slope. There were a couple of buildings and some sculptures, their forms half-erased by wind and snow. The valley itself was full of human bones.
Monster Planet
Chapter Eleven