Awake in the Night Land (30 page)

I leaped to my feet, aghast. The non-earthly servants of the Northwest Watching Thing had made a way for its earthly servants to pass. A corridor for the abhumans had been decreed. Such cooperation had been known to exist among the Night Land at some eons of time and not among others.

Something stealthy must have seen me rise to unwarily to my feet, and decided to stalk no longer, but rush. Immediately I heard noises in the dark to one side of me; I fled the other way, as quickly as stealth allowed.

The noise grew dim behind me. This place was all shadows, for the light from the plains below did not reach. In the dark I turned to the cliffwall and climbed it, I could not see the cliff with my eyes, but the discipline I had used to clear my soul from the influences of the Lesser Dome allowed me to know this earth as if it were part of me, for this rock here was not desecrated by the Blue Fire.

There was a roar from behind. I glanced over my shoulder. Far below, beyond the edge the ash-heaps and volcano-spew of normal earth I saw, all at once, the corridor of darkness where there was no flame vanished. I assume it required some energy unknown to this our normal condition of time and space either to create the blue fire or to draw it back; and that whatever had been damming or quenching the flame had shattered.

When the two walls of fire crashed together, they sent up a white dazzle of forked lightning reaching upward three or four hundred feet above the plain, blinding and terrible. In that gruesome and shadowless burst of light I could see the cliff; I was but a little yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks.

The light was splashing against the height where I was, but nothing was visible below me. Like the echo of a low mocking chuckle floating through the night, my brain elements detected a sensation of hunger, a desire to break my bones between long red teeth, and sensation of dry, sarcastic humor.

With my brain elements, I also sensed another band of them, crowching low and running on their knuckles, rushing along the ridge of the volcano crater lip, trying to reach me. The ones below me, I could now hear with my ears, were leaping with simian agility from rock to rock to come at me.

Desperately I scrambled upward. I found myself in one of the worst fighting positions imaginable.

The lip of the dead volcano was like a ridge of fangs, uneven underfoot, treacherous with ice and pebbles, and the obsidian rock was slick. The place to put my feet was no wider than a cubit. A sudden terrible drop to the blue plain was to my one hand. The other hand was like a bowl of shadow, for I could not see if the drop were sudden or gentle, which led to the floor of the volcano crater. In that moment, how I yearned to see it! (It is an odd thing that the black and cracked rock of the mouth of volcano would seem normal, even homely, to me then; but I had just walked through the land of the pale blue flame, and seen the trembling dust and strangely shaped white rocks which writhe and glow beneath the curtains of blue energy.)

I could hear footfalls as abhumans came toward me along this narrow pathway, drawn by the sound of my breathing, the heat of my blood. I measured the sound of their approach with my ear, and I knew I could not outrun them, not on this brink. There was no point in stealth.

The Diskos gave forth a terrible low roar very cheering to my ear, and in that flash of bright light from the spinning disk, I saw the terrified and astonished eyes of the first of the abhumans, much closer than I had thought, as the blade almost of its own accord leaped on in its telescoping haft and slashed him neatly through the throat. His head went toppling one way and his body the other. Here a miracle of luck occurred, for I heard the toppling body strike one of the climbing shapes who at the same time were closing in on me from below, and he screamed as he fell, and his comrades tittered and coughed with laughter. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the falling bodies, one headless and one not, outlined against the weird blue fire of the plain below, and saw them disintegrate.

The next one behind him was not so rash, but hooted and smiled, waiting for his comrade below to rise up and strike at my legs. I clove his skull in twain with a mighty overhand sweep of my weapon, and the smiling one lunged at me, trying to take me around the body with his powerful arms, or sink his fangs into my neck. His teeth slid against my neck armor without finding purchase.

We both fell.

I must have been within sight of the Last Redoubt, for in the ether all about me, I heard a great gasp and roar of alarm, as all the gathered hopes and fears of the millions of watching souls back there saw me slip down out of sight.

My armor clanged and banged around me as I cartwheeled down the slope, and the lanyard around my wrist sent my Diskos whirling in huge white circles of crackling fire around me. My Diskos, confused, extended itself to full length, so that the blade was away from my body as I tumbled down the slope.

It was utter darkness here. No light from the Blue Pain, no illumination from the Last Redoubt, not even the weird glow of the Seven Lights from the Black Hills touched my eye. The walls of the volcano blocked all.

The slope was steep and grew less steep. My armor protected me from the worst of the fall, for no bones were broken. The headlong fall turned into a tumble, and then into a long slide across some form of slice rock.

The Diskos blade had stopped spinning during the fall, and so it was as utterly dark as if I were blind. It was only because I could feel the health of the balls of my eye with my mind that I knew I was hale. I came to my feet, and a groan and a gasp escaped me.

The abhuman had not only survived the fall and landed near me, but had kept his wits, for when I made that involuntary noise of pain, I felt the rush of his attack through the air nearby. I swung the Diskos one-handed, an awkward blow. The weapon was still at his full extension. There was no flare, no noise, since I struck with the insulated part of the haft, but I must have struck the soft parts of his lower belly, for he lost his footing in the dark. I heard a yelp and a splash and cold water drenched me.

I lit the blade. There was a shout from above, and I heard the noise of roars, and the crash of many bodies falling. Without turning my head to look, I knew what had happened: the abhumans, with their typical hatred for their own crooked lives, had flung themselves down the slope after me, willing to risk that headlong fall if only for a chance to slay one of the men who retained the form and features of the earlier world.

Before me, in the light of that weapon, I saw the abhuman, a great brute dressed only in his own shaggy hide, climbing out of the waters of a lake were he had fallen. Over eons moisture from the upper air had somehow gathered as dew along the inner lip of the crater, and there must have been lingering heat underfoot in the rocks of the lake bottom, for it had not turned to ice.

There must have been other abhumans who had not flung themselves down the slope. In the darkness above and behind me, some man-beasts must have been able to see us: and I heard hisses and grunts in their language as they called out smirking advice, sardonic japes and deprecations to their unbeloved comrade. From his eyes I could see he was not comforted by their calls.

At that same moment, I felt in my soul a profound chill, and I knew it was some force from the House of Silence breathing courage and inhuman intelligence into this degenerate beast-man. He backed away into the waters, where were not deep in that place, and circled to my left and leaping to the shore.

I did not bother to glance behind me. The light from my weapon would not reach up that slope. But with my brain elements, I could feel the ebbing of life where six or seven abhumans had broken their necks or backs in the fall, and five more were sliding down the ice-streaked wall, pain radiating from broken limbs, but no thoughts from their unconscious brains. Two more were too wounded to move.

And yet there was over of score of them, perhaps two dozen, who had made it to the less steep parts of the slope, and were leaping and loping toward me, panting.

There he picked his fallen truncheon. He held it in his two forepaws, and broke it neatly across his knee, so that he held two: I saw he meant merely to feint with one and smite with the other; no matter which way I turned, he would surely smite from the other way, and have me. I am not a small man, nor a weak one, but I was as a child before this apelike mass of brawn and cunning.

He stepped hugely forward, and my spirit shrank within me, and his spirit grew like a terrible and hungry shadow.

The Diskos in my hands now spun more fiercely, and the light of the blade seemed to warm soul. I slashed at him, and when he parried with his two bone truncheons, I merely cut them in twain.

With a great round stroke I lopped his right arm nearly off. All his muscles jerked and the Earth Current formed a momentary, instantaneous bridge of sparks between this gushing stump and the whirling blade. He was flung backward, three limbs jerking with spams, and he fell.

It amazed me that he did not die from the energy-stroke. I assume some of the coldness of the House of Silence somehow preserved him, for in his eyes I saw the unclean spirit still lingering, staring at me.

The monster climbed to the top of a square black stone protruding from the shore rocks, and collapsed, clutched his severed stump with his great left paw, and raised his muzzle and howled in pain, calling up the slope band to come quickly. They answered with jeering laughs and small hiccoughs of irony, but their voices were far too near. They were on the level ground loping near.

It was hopeless. I could not prevail against twenty-four of these man-brutes. A tingling seemed to pass up my gauntlets into my arms, as if my weapon were urging me not to despair.

And I laughed, because suddenly I saw victory. Leaving the one-armed abhuman, assuming his mates did not rip him apart, to bleed to death at his stone, I doused the light of the weapon, folded it, and ran into the lakewater. It was an ungainly run, for I lifted my knees as high as I could to splash through the clinging coldness, but I kept on until the waters were around my waste, then around my chest.

I heard the complaints and mocking hoots of the abhumans in their numbers coming after me in the darkness, puffing and blowing, wading or swimming.

I waited until they were near. In the utter darkness, I could still feel their brutal animal life-force beating the air around me. They formed a semicircle when I turned to face them. The ones nearest to me laughed.

I ignited the blade. The Earth Current skipped across the surface of the water like lightning. The noise of their screams was hideous because it was so soft and quiet; the muscles of their lungs were in seizure, and turned the screaming into gasps and coughs. All twenty-three of them gathered to kill me jerked and danced only a moment in the waters, and then the waters swallowed them beneath the black surface. The Earth Current of my own beloved weapon did not hurt me, of course. It was attuned to my vital essence.

Slowly I waded toward shore. I still felt a sense of darkness in my soul, but my brain element detected nothing living near me. I raised my weapon overheard like a banner, and set the disk to spinning. The living light came forth, bright as a torch.

There were simply no abhumans here. One and all had perished following me into the lake waters. I stepped out of the waters, and my heavy cloak shook itself free of moisture, and gave off warmth to dry me.

I came to where the corpse the abhuman was, still perched atop the black rock to which he had fled. He was seated with his back to me. The blood was no longer pumping from his arm stump, but it was not yet dry.

Perhaps I should have been more cautious, and avoided the thing altogether, but I was curious as to how it remained seated upright while dead. Curious? No, let me be honest: I wanted to look at my trophy. One man slaying two dozen such foes? I doubt there was such a feat in the last million years of the histories of the Last Redoubt.

So I approached the stone. And the man-beasts turned his head, even through there was no life in it, twisting it around on its neck like the head of an owl.

The abhuman was grinning, and his eyes glinted like black stones, and his beast mask was transformed, for the force possessing him was the only thing inside his corpse now: it was no longer a
him
, but an
it
.

Before, he had been almost a man. Now the face was something wholly opposite a man, something antithetical to all life.

The emptiness in the eyes pierce my spirit, and I cowered back, one hand raised as if to ward off a blow.

"Why do you hate us?" I whispered aloud, gasping. "Why do you attack us?"

"Malice is its own reason," The words from the mouth were in an ancient language. "Malice needs no justification. The Great Ones could have smashed your flimsy metal house long and long ago, child of Man, but it is your degradation they crave: death is too noble. For centuries they will torment your dead, until even your memories are a torment. I am made in mockery of you, me and all my race, a crooked copy, merely so that you can be told this final secret: there is nothing."

"What have we ever done? Did our ancestors open up a gate into an ulterior dimension and release these horrors? What is the reason?"

It laughed without breath. "No reason. There is nothing. You are to die. You scream in the night. The silence will not answer you."

By that time, I was able to gather my spirit and clear my mind. The Diskos roared like a lion of the ancient world, and the light from the blade fell upon the dead shape. The force inside shrieked, the body jerked upward and fell headlong off the rock. Where the holy light from the mighty blade shined on it, the flesh took on the appearance of natural and dead flesh.

With the haft of the blade, and a great groan, I turned the body over, and exposed that side also to the weapon's light, until it was purified also.

What was it? The noise of many voices from the Last Redoubt was gone. It was as if all mankind held its breath. There was some danger visible to the Great Spyglass of he Monstruwacans of the Tower, and yet it was something which did not make the Last Redoubt sound the mighty trumpets of the Home Calling. This was because they did not dare to signal, lest the sign be heard, and their signal make my foes rush in.