Awake in the Night Land (5 page)

But no traveler is unwise enough to step into such a high plain lit so well. The bottom mile of the pyramid is darkened, her base-level cities long abandoned, and the lower windows covered over with armor plate. A skirt, as it were, of shadow surrounded the base of the pyramid, and one must travel away from the pyramid to expose oneself to the shining of the many windows of the Last Redoubt; even before leaving the protection of the skirt of shadow, there are many places where the ground has been tormented into crooked dells and ragged shapes, dry canyons, or deep scars from the ancient glaciers or the far more ancient weapons of prehistory. Such broken ground I sought.

I entered the canyons to the west within the first two hours of traveling, and encountered no beasts, no forces of horror.

My way was blocked by a river of boiling mud shown on none of our maps. The telescopes and viewing tables of our pyramid had never noted it, despite that it was so close to us, for ash floated in a layer atop the mud-flow, and was the same hue as the ground itself. It was not visible to me until my foot broke the sticky surface and I scalded my foot. Perhaps it was newly erupted from some fire-hole or perhaps it had been here for centuries. We know so little.

This mud river drove me south and curving around the side of the pyramid, and I marched thirty hours and three. I ate twice of the tablets, and slept once, finding a warm space behind a tall rock where heat and some uncouth vapor escaped from a rent in the ground.

Before I slept, I probed the sand near the rent with the hilt of my Diskos, and a little serpent, no more than an ell in length, reared up. It was a blind albino worm, of the kind called the amphisbaena, for its tail had a scorpion’s stinger. I slew it with a fire-glittering stroke from my roaring weapon, and the heavy blade passed through the worm as it were made of air, and the halves were flung smoking to either side. It was with great contentment I slept, deeming myself to be a mighty hero and a slayer of monsters.

The encampment and stronghold of Usire, I knew from my books, and from my memory-dreams, lay to the north by north west beyond the shoulders and back of the Northwest Watching Thing. There are other watchers more dreadful, but none is more alert, for the ground to the Northwest is wide and flat in prospect, and it is lit by the Vale of Red Fire; and there is neither a crown nor eye-beam nor wide dome of light to interfere with the view the monster commands.

To go to the country beyond the creature, my way must go far around, for the North way was too well watched. To my West was the Pit of Red Smoke itself, a land of boiling chasms and lakes of fire, impassible. To the East of me, I could see the silhouette of the Gray Dunes: and here was a sunken country populated by thin and stilt-legged creatures, much in shape like featherless birds, and they carried iron hooks, and they were very careful never to expose themselves to the windows of the pyramid as they stirred and crawled from pit to pit. The canyon walls were riddled with black doorways, from whence, now and again, the Wailing which gives the Place of Wailing its name would rise, and the bird-things would caper silently and flourish their hooks. To the east I would not go.

I went South.

Each time I rose after snatched sleep, the shapes of two of the Great Watching Things, malign and silent, were closer and clearer to my gaze.

First, to my right, rising, vast and motionless, the Thing of the Southwest was but a dim silhouette, larger than a hill. It was alive, but not as we know life. There was a crack in the ground at its feet, from which a beam of light rose, to illume part of that monstrous cheek, and cast shadows across its lowering brow. Its bright left eye hung in the blackness, slit-pupilled and covered with red veins, seemingly as big as the Full Moon that once hung above a world whose nights came and went.

Some say this eye is blinded by the beam, and that the beam was sent by Good Forces to preserve us. Others say the beam assists the eye to cast its baleful influence upon us, for it is noted by those whose business it is to study nightmares, that this great cat-like eye appears more often in our dreams than any other image of the Night Lands.

I remember my mother telling me once, how a time came when that great eye, over a period of weeks, was seen to close; and a great celebration was held in the many cities of the pyramid, and they celebrated for a reason they knew not why. They knew only that the eye had never before been known to close. But the lid was not to stay closed forever and aye; in eleven year’s time, a crack had appeared between the upper and nether lid, for the monster was only blinking a blink. Each year the crack widened. By the time I was born, the eye was fully opened, and so it had been all of my life.

Second, to my left was the great Watching Thing of the South, which is larger and younger than the other Watching Things, being only some three million years ago that it emerged from the darkness of the unexplored southern lands, advancing several inches a decade, and it passed over the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk between twenty-five and twenty-four hundred thousand years ago.

Then, suddenly, some twenty-two hundred thousand years ago, before its mighty paws, there opened a rent in the ground, from which a pearl or bubble of pure white light rose into view. Over many centuries the pearl grew to form a great smooth dome some half a mile broad. The Watching Thing of the South placed its paw on the dome, and it rises no further, but neither has the Watching Thing advanced across that mighty dome of light in all these years.

It is known from prophecy that this is the Watcher who will break open the doors of the Pyramid with one stroke of its paw, some four and a half million years from now, but that the death of all mankind will be prevented for another half million years by a pale and slender strand of white light that will emerge from the ground at the very threshold of the great gates. More than this, the dreams of the future do not tell.

Between the Watching Thing of the South and of the South-West, the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk runs across a dark land. The Road was broad, and could not be crossed except in the full view of the Watching Things to the South and the South-West. But the ground on the far side of the Road is dim, lit by few fire-pits, and coated with rubble and drifts of black snow, where a man could hide.

In this direction was my only hope. Suppose that the eye-beam does indeed blind the right eye of the Watching Thing of the South-West, and suppose again that the dome of light troubles the vision of the Great Watcher of the South more than the Monstruwacans have guessed: I could cross the Great Road on the blind side of the South-West monster, and sneak between him and his brother, perhaps to hide among the black snowdrifts beyond. I would then follow the road as it wound past the place of the abhumans, and then leave the road and venture north, into the unknown country called the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill.

Weeks of darkness passed. It is not just for food and drink and warmth I hungered, but also for light, for rest, for a place to set my heavy weapon down and never to see it again (and yet I never put it from my hand; not to eat, not to drink, not to evacuate my bowels, and certainly not to sleep).

I yearned for salve to sooth my feet where my boots, perfectly fitted when I was hale, fit me but ill, now that my flesh had shrunk from hunger and cold, and chafed me.

I yearned for clear, warm water with which to wash my eyes of the grit and tears that had frozen there, tiny icicles on my lashes. The smoke-holes I had to approach to stay warm enough to live would choke me, and make my eyes water; and I dare not cough, for fear of what might hear me; I could not wipe my eyes with the icy-cold metal of my gauntlet, and I dared not take my gauntlets off, because this needs both hands, and to put my weapon down, even for a moment, I had been trained not to do. So I would weep when gritty sulfur fumes would blow into my face, and I would look at my supply of water-generating powder, and know that I had not enough to last for drinking as it was.

But laying down to sleep on the cold ground was the worst part of it.

For I was afraid.

I was afraid to put my back to the ground; and afraid to close my eyes, even though, in the gloom of the Night Lands, my open eyes showed me little more than deceptive plumes of flame erupting from distant earth-cracks, or wavering little light, like St. Elmo’s Fire, that sizzled from peak to peak of glassy crater-pocked hilltops, or the blotchy shine seeping from soil deadly to tread upon. It was not merely the monsters that I feared, though Night-Hounds and giant slug-things were terrible enough, it was the Powers for which we have no names.

I could sense them moving through the upper air, or running like buried streams through the ground underfoot, ancient, malignant, and terrible. At times they whispered to each other, and I could hear them in my heart, though I could not make out words.

Their hatred for mankind, their terrible hunger, beat in the air like a drum, like the pressure of a storm about to break; and I could sense their malice moving across the night land, creeping from hill to valley, from crater to lava-bed, from glacier to fire-pit, restless, inhuman, extraterrestrial, infinite.

As I passed through the diseased Land of the Abhumans, crawling from ditch to ditch, and hiding in the ash of cold crater-mouths, I saw the race destined to replace us, walking on their back paws with large steps across a land the dark powers had given them. They were stoop-shouldered, crooked-legged men with powerful chests, and arms as thick as my leg. Their nails were black like iron, and their hairy pelts were thick and coarse, like the pelts of shaggy wolves from a former age; their mouths were like the muzzles of baboons, with canines keener than my dirk. They had no tool more complex than the thigh-bone of a Night-Hound; that they used for truncheons. Their dams and their spratlings were equally unlovely.

But it was not their crudeness that repelled me; it was the wisdom in their eyes, their wolf-eyes glowing green beneath thick brow ridges. I saw in their expressions a cruelty, a haunting and solemn cruelty, humans are not prone to know.

As I passed through their lands, they grew aware of me, and hunted me.

With the abhumans on my trail, I was driven east, back toward the Pit of Red Smoke. I entered the rocky and broken terrain surrounding the lip of the pit, a land of cliffs and standing stones. The land here was tormented, as if giants with axes had split the ground and flung huge boulders each every way, (though our records show no trace that they had ever done any such thing here), and often I came across rows of pillars and the rubble where walls had been.

Over several watches the abhumans hunted me, and I needed to rely upon my memory of the maps I had studied in the House of the Monstruwacans of this bit of terrain so that a retreat down some promising canyon would not turn into a cul-de-sac and death. When the Pit of Red Smoke was belching opaque clouds, and the land was dark, I moved; when the Pit was calm, and red shine hung on the bellies of low clouds, and red shadows fell across the stark rocks of the land, I hid. At such times, I could see the Last Redoubt, shining and beautiful in the distance. But, nearer at hand, I saw the Lesser Dome of Too Many Doors, windowless and crusted with pentagonal cracks as if it had been the shell of a monstrous tortoise; I also saw, to one side and beyond it, the lowering profile of the Northwest Watching thing.

Once I woke to hear stealthy noises in the dark to one side of me. I fled the other way, as quickly as silence allowed, and, in the dark, climbed a cliff, with nothing to guide me but touch in finding the hand-holds and toe-holds up the icy rock face. I had to draw off my gauntlets to do it, because the fingers of the gauntlet were too clumsy for this work, but the stone soon sucked all the heat and feeling out of my fingers; with numb hands, I could not feel where the stone was, and, in the dark, the rocky cliff seemed to no longer be vertical.

I heard sniffing noises underfoot, and caught the odor of abhumans thick in the air.

All at once, blinding me, a flare from the Pit of Red Smoke rose up, and I could see the cliff; I was but a yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks. The light exposed me, but the canyon from which I had just crawled from was black to my eyes. I heard a low sardonic mutter of abhumans speaking to each other when I became visible. For some reason, it chilled me to hear them, so calm, so self-controlled, when they spotted me. I did not know what words they said, but their tones were remote and dry.

When I crested the brink, I heard a low, mocking laugh coming from my left. Here, out from the shadow of a tall rock, and into the leaping red light, came three hunched figures. Ape-like, they moved on feet and knuckles, carrying their truncheons in their teeth, but when they rose to their back feet they each grasped their truncheons in one or both forepaws, and rushed toward me. They smiled grimly as they came. The stench from their powerful arms was terrible.

I drew the Diskos, and felt the power in the haft enter my hands and warm them; the flare of light, the terrible roar of the spinning blade, caused the foremost abhuman to hesitate. I slashed him across the belly, and lighting threw his guts unwinding from the ghastly wound; his body jumped a yard into the air from the electric shock, arms and legs jerking as the other two closed in on either side of me and aimed truncheon-blows at my legs and head.

One blow struck my leg-armor, which rang like a bell; I fell, so the other blow passed my helmet and struck the rock to one side of me with such force that the rock splintered and flew in pieces. By this mere mischance was my life saved.

At that same moment, the flare from the red pit ended, and black smoke smothered all the light. The Diskos, either by chance, or due to its own wiliness, ceased to spin and roar, so the blade went dark; and I felt the hulking mass of the abhuman move near above me in the sudden dark.

I rolled awkwardly to one side; something in my motion startled the abhuman stooping over me. I heard his truncheon whistle through the air and I felt rock-splinters from his superhuman blow ringing against my armor. But he must have lost his footing in the dark, for there was a slither of pebbles, and rush of air, and, with the low, ironic mutter like a curse, I heard the great beast-man fall. There were hisses from down below in the canyon, low sounds suggestive of irony and contempt, and perhaps a scoffing laugh or two, when the body fell among those gathered there.