Awake in the Night Land (16 page)

“I turned the rest of the men back, but not in time to save us.

“By the time we descended to warmer lands, and came within sight of the Great Redoubt in the far distance again, the abhumans had been warned, and were waiting.

“There were only nine of us left by the time we found a place to hide on the shore of a lake of salty poison. When those nine were dead, I used their bloated corpses as a raft, and the bodies were buoyant in that thick, mineral fluid. The abhumans on the shore could not follow. I built my hut of bricks of ice on a small atoll in the middle of that lake of poison.

“There I found my Hounds. They saved my life, you know. I could not have made it back through the leaguer of the abhumans, had they not scouted the terrain for me, killed the guards, slain the giants. And now they sit outside, crying for me. When I sleep, I hear them, you know. In my sleep.”

Flick.
We shall live again, my beloved, for such is my song!

That was the last time I saw him alive.

Of course, I suppose I saw him alive several times after this, but seeing a magnified image of someone through the glass floor of the Viewing Chamber is not the same.

There were thousands of us gathered just from this level, and millions watching through similar Viewing Tables in all the cities of mankind on every inhabited deck. My seat was a privileged one, nearest the surface of the glass, and my neighbors were gathered row upon row in seats above and around me.

His escape was remarkable: he trod out into the gloom, head held high, making no attempt to hide or slink or crawl from rock to rock. The Dun Giants who are encamped so near our gates could be seen in the Viewing Table, hulking shadows against the shadows of broken rock, glaring in surprise at his boldness, and gesturing hugely with their arms to bring their brothers leaping quickly from rock to rock, gathering around him. How small he was next to them.

They gathered from the left and right, readying an ambuscade. The heaviest of the giants came loping out from the tall rocks to bar my brother’s path, and flourished high his truncheon, grinning with mirth. The man-creature’s tusks wet with drool, no doubt at the thought of feasting on man-flesh, and the piggish face was lit up with a strangely innocent glee, and the grisly mouth was wide and smiling.

Two huge wolflike shapes came lumbering out of the gloom. Draego hamstrung the giant, and Dracaina tore out his throat as he fell, all in one swift and well-practiced move.

When the next of the giants lunged, Draego’s monster teeth closed on an arm as thick as a tree-limb, but now it was Polynices who moved. His lit his weapon and swung the wheel-blade through the soft part of the giant’s neck with an expert stroke, the blade-lightning illuminating the night for just that moment. The coordination as they fought was as strange as the figures of a dance: each knew where the other would be. All three, Polynices, and his two horrific beasts, moved as one.

They slew many giants, and many more ran away.

There was no feat of arms in living memory to equal this, not for three generations of man.

There was utter silence in the auditorium as we watched, thousands of us, and even the hawkers selling beer and smelling salts were voiceless with awe.

In the image in the Viewing Table, we saw the Night-Hounds raise their red mussels toward the smoldering clouds of heaven. A moment later, through some high windows in the northeastern wall of the Pyramid, very dimly, we heard the cry of the Night-Hounds, yowling their victory.

Over the next week, off and on, I watched my brother as he fared across the Night Lands with his two monsters. He had brought out from the Pyramid a pack of food tablets, which he fed them.

The abhumans are the most like us of all the creatures of the Darkness, and, after being abroad seventy hours, Polynices came across a little hut of them, a bull, his mate and three sprats. The hut consisted of hides stretched across a framework of dried worm bones, placed like an upturned cup across the mouth of a smokehole, to gather in the heat and light. Polynices slew the creatures with his Diskos, and his Night-Hounds ate their bodies. He lodged himself and his pets in their home.

Ismene says she saw him chewing flesh from the dead abhumans also, which is a sign that he had forgotten part of his human nature, and lost the Master Word. I saw him reach down and examine the bodies with his knife, but he could have been putting his hand to his mouth for any number of other reasons.

Polynices was often missing from the view table, as the operator of the lenses could find no clue of his hiding places, for the gray armor is meant to blend into the dark landscape. But when the Monstruwacans in their tower detected the discharge of Earth-Current, they would send the dial-numbers of their elevation and right track to the Viewers, who would train their arrangements of lenses on the area so identified, and sweep back and forth, seeking.

I was sleeping when the news came that the Slowly Turning Wheel had appeared out of the North, and the black mists parted around it as it advanced.

I ran from my chambers, still in my nightdress, down the many steps of the East-Northeast Stair to find the Viewing Table Chamber. Red light from the windows beat against the stairway as I ran, for the Night Land was stirring: the eerie whistle of the Sundering Worm, the deep strange voice of the Thing That Nods, and the roaring of brutes and the hooting of giants all rose in a nightmare clamor. The wild noise of hammers striking anvils issued from the underground holes to the south, as a sound of rage or celebration, and mocking laughter yammered from the smoke-filled valleys to the south-west.

A shrill, fell cry sounded from one of the windowless mile-high Towers which rise to the West of the Last Redoubt, and my spirit trembled, for I could feel the disturbance in the aether which followed that cry. Through the windows, looking up, I beheld massive splashes of red light beat against those slightly tilted towers of black metal.

Then I heard from all the windows, louder than any trumpet, the Home-Call, that great and mighty noise sent by the Monstruwacans to warn Polynices of a danger nigh to him. The sound was deafening. It overwhelmed the shrieks of the Night Land.

Beware; beware!

Again it sounded, and again.

Return, O thou Lost! Follow my Call and Return!

Slowly, the armored plates began to rise up across the windows, and the whisper of the Air-Clog began to make that deep hum which it only makes in time of grave danger. It meant that a Great Power, one of the Ulterior Beings, was abroad in the Night.

With a clang, the window armor fell across the scene, and the reddish light of eruption was shut out.

The Home-Call fell silent a minute or two before I reached the floor where the Viewing Table Chamber lay.

I ran down the corridors toward the Chamber, an endless time of running, silence all around me.

I am of the blood of Mirdath. I could feel the disturbance in the night as the prayers and hopes of the Millions in the Last Redoubt reached out across the Night Land toward some horrid danger facing Polynices. My legs moved as if in a slow dream, and I knew I had seen all this in a dream before; my eyes were blinded with salt tears, for I knew the ending of the dream.

I arrived at the doors leading to the Viewing Chamber when I felt the hope shatter and die in the air around me. Through the doors shut tight before me, I heard a great multitude of people all call out at once, a noise of breathless terror and woe.

Then, silence. I threw my shoulder to the door before the footman could open it for me.

My sister was already kneeling on the glass floor far below, weeping. Other women of my household had their veils across their faces.

And dimly, through the windows, I could hear the cry of the Night-Hounds, lamenting their fallen master.

Ismene told me later he had been traveling north, nigh to the House of Silence, for there was a nest of Night-Hounds there whose mother had been killed by a blood-drinker. He was seeking the whelps.

After my brother’s death, it became my habit to pay calls on Triptolemus the Foreteller. Under the austerity rules of his Order, he is not allowed to serve lavish entertainments, and so he was one of the few acquaintances from Father’s reign I could call upon without embarrassment to either of us. If a noble fed me according to my rank, this might be seen as a criticism of Creon, or showing support for the old regime: such slights are remembered when a man presents his son for elevation, or commendation to the Orders, or the Watch; under Creon’s rule, such slights were also remembered when magistrates convened in secret to draw up lists of infractions against the public discipline. Triptolemus was immune from such considerations.

He would often welcome me with a loaf and a carafe of heavily watered wine, but it was no better and no worse than what he fed himself.

We sat in his cabin which overlooks the Mad Library, where books whose thought-images are no longer sane are kept. Here were stacks of insulated cases, sandwiched between panels of meditative cork to mute the aether-noise. Whenever a scholar picked up one of the mad books with a pair of insulated tongs, the recorded voices would cry out, threatening or pleading, books begging to be read, promising forbidden knowledge.

It sounded so much like one of the Mountains in the Night Land, that I was amazed anyone could dwell in this chamber, much less come here to study. But much of the ancient learning is lost, and there is always a scholar optimistic that a coherent account can be pieced together from the scattered jumble of ruined books.

He would shut the grate and block the noise and mind-noise while we spoke.

We talked of many light things, and some grave things. Once we spoke of Polynices.

I cannot name the watch or week when this was. Before, I was merely entertaining the notion of saving my brother; after this conversation, the purpose had hardened as if by alchemy into adamant.

It started with a question, which I uttered idly. The barrier of the Air-Clog reaches all the way to the Electric Circle surrounding the base of the Great Redoubt to sheath its utmost tower. The aether-force from the Circle is alleged to repel all unclean spirits, and even the mightiest of the Nameless Ones is unable to cross it. How had Polynices gotten his Night-Hounds across it, either going in or coming out?

Triptolemus frowned and did not speak for many a minute. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. But then he stirred and spoke.

“Like all secrets, the key is terrible and simple,” said Triptolemus, “Though the Master Monstruwacan would have forbidden your brother egress had he known your brother knew it. I can only assume your brother deduced during the long months while he was Out. Naturally, I can tell it to you, a woman.”

I said, perhaps a little stiffly, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the pool of candidates for proposed ventures would double. We have yet to discover what the creature is who comes to stand near the Great South Watcher, although his tracks are plain where he crosses the Road; the near side of the Deep Red Pit has never been glimpsed, despite that it is so close. Perhaps there is a city there, perhaps not; we cannot tell merely from the thickness and composition of the smoke which rises up, whether it is chimney smoke from furnaces. A woman could skulk to the edge of the Pit and look down as easily as a man.”

He said, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the Pyramid would fall in a generation. They need only capture one, and breed from her a hybrid who can speak the Master Word, and our firmest defenses are negated at that one stroke.”

I said impatiently, “An old and wearisome excuse! Thousands or tens of thousands of women were captured surely when the Lesser Redoubt fell, a million years ago.”

“Perhaps their menfolk were mindful enough to slay them before they were Destroyed. In any case, an era when our population numbers dwindle is not an era where such talk as this is wise. Wives have duties more pressing than to make their children orphans.”

“It takes no great strength to fire an harquebus.”

He shook his head with sorrow. “Weapons that smite at a distance are an unwise innovation to our times! They should never have been reinvented. Such discharges draw with disproportionate swiftness the greater, older, and more cunning of the foes that slay us. It was your ancestor, Andros, whose bad example resurrected the ancient folly of tele-bellipotent weapons. The Monstruwacans sent discharges of Earth-Current rolling down the side of the Pyramid to slay his pursuers, killing many of them while they were yet afar off. After this, for years, men said, why not have a smaller instrument to do the same? Will it matter if the Older Powers are stirred up by their discharge, since they already bring their full force to bear against the Great Redoubt? So it was argued. Folly! There were many periods in history when the Redoubt was not pressed so close as this, when armed giants build encampments within half a mile off our doors and posterns. The Night Land has seethed with anger for a million years, and the choleric energy levels are higher than other eras have known. They are certain to try some desperate, telling stroke against us, and we have stirred them up to it. It is only a matter of time before someone insists it is wise to take an harquebus outside, using it not for defense of our walls only.”

I thought it best not to mention, at that moment, my desire to equip myself with an harquebus and travel Out.

He shook his head, his dim eyes focused on nothing. With a thin hand he clutched the Foretelling chain around his neck, the symbol of his talent.

“Creon promises a return to the old ways, and the condemnation of such weapons. He is lying—I can sense such things, as can anyone who knows how to focus a Mind Glass—but I urged the masters of our order to acclaim for him nonetheless. Because the truth escapes his lips, whether he knows it or not. The old ways will return.

“Do you know how long we have been deviant from the ancient and established practices of our ancestors? Six hundred years, if one counts from the time of the mutation riots in Courtstairwell, when the last Soul Glass was shattered; less than that, if you count from the time when the other cities adopted the New Regulations, and the multitudes cried out for a Castellan to govern us, rather than sages, using arms rather than words to chastise the scofflaw.