Awake in the Night Land (8 page)

The next two of the coven stood perhaps twenty feet from me, near the broken gate; it was a miracle I had not brushed against them in the dark as I crept between them, unknowing of my danger. Even as quiet as I was, how had they not heard the tiny noises I had made, creeping in their very midst?

Then I knew. It was not the noise carried by the air they heeded. It was not with ears they heard. They were spirits mighty, fell, and terrible, and they did never sleep nor pause in their watch. A hundred years, a thousand, a million, meant nothing to them. They had been waiting for some unwise child of man to sneak forth from the Last Redoubt to find the empty house of Usire, dead these many years. They had been waiting for a thought of fear to touch among them: fear like mine.

With one accord, making no sound at all, the dozens of hooded figures turned, and the hoods now faced me.

I felt a coldness enter into my heart, and I knew that I was about to die, for I felt the coldness somehow (and I know not how this could be, and I know not how I knew it) was swallowing the very matter and substance of my heart into an awful silence. My cells, my blood, my nerves, were being robbed of life, or of the properties of matter that allow physical creatures such as man to be alive.

I turned to flee, but I fell, for my legs had turned cold. I made to raise my forearm to my lips and bite down on the capsule, but my arm would not obey. My other arm was numb also, and the great weapon fell from my fingers. Nor could my spirit sense the power in the metal any longer, despite that the shaft and blade were still whole. The Diskos was still alive, but I wondered if its soul had been Destroyed, and feared I was to follow.

Then I could neither move my eyes nor close them. Above me there was only black cloud, lit here and there with a creeping gray half-light. A sharp rock was pushed into the joint between my gorget and the neck-piece of my helm, so that my head was craned back at a painful angle; and yet I could not lift my head.

The Silent Ones made no noise, and I could not see if they approached, but in my soul I felt them drifting near, their empty hoods bent toward me, solemn and quiet.

Then the clouds above me parted.

I saw a star.

Whether all the stars had been extinguished; or whether the zone of radiation that surrounds our world, transparent in former ages, had grown opaque; or whether there was merely a permanent layer of cloud and ash suffocating our world, helping to slow the escape of heat, had been debated for many an age among savants and knowledgeable people. Of these three, I had always inclined to the last opinion, thinking the stars too high and fine to have been reached by the corrupt powers of the Night Land.

That the Night had power to quench the stars was too dread to believe; but that the stars should have the grace to push aside the smog and filth of the earth, and allow one small man one last glimpse of something high and beautiful, was too wondrous to hope.

I cannot tell you how I knew it was a star, and not the eye of some beast leaning down from a cliff impossibly high above, or some enigmatic torch of the Night World suspended and weightless in the upper air, bent on strange and dreadful business.

And yet more than my eye was touched by the silvery ray that descended from that elfin light; I saw it was diamond in heaven, indeed, but somehow also a flame and a burning ball of gas, immensely far away; and how such a thing could have a mind, and be aware of me, and turn and look at me, and come to my aid in my hour of need, I cannot tell you, for diamonds and flames and balls of gas do not have souls; but neither can I tell you how a hill, shaped like unto a grisly inhuman thing, could sit and watch the Last Redoubt of Man, without stirring and flinching for a million years. Is the one more unlikely than the other?

I felt strength burning in me, human strength, and I raised my head.

The coven of Silent Ones was here, but the blank hoods were lifted and turned toward the one star. The thoughts, the cold thoughts of the Silent Ones were no longer in me.

A fog was rising. As mild and as little as the light from the star might have been, it somehow made little fingers of white mist seep up from the sand.

There may have been a natural, rather than a supernatural explanation for this; but I doubt it. Like a veil, the pure cloud rose to hide me from the enemy; the delicate rays of this one star still shined through these pearly curtains, and illuminated them, and made every bead and hanging breath of the mist all silvery and fair to see.

If this were not supernatural, then the supernatural world should be ashamed that such wonders can be wrought by merely natural means, by starlight, and little water-drops.

While the Silent Ones were closed off behind a wall of fog, I picked up my weapon and crept away. I was blinded, so I followed the star. Here and there about me in the silvery mists, I could see looming shadows of the Silent Ones, terrible and motionless. And yet they did not sense me, or do me hurt, which I attest is starkly impossible, unless but that one of the Good Powers that old tales said sometimes save men from the horrors of the Night had indeed suspended the normal course of time, or relaxed the iron laws of nature out of mercy. No one knows these things.

The star led me to where a little stand of moss-bush spread. Beneath the bush was hid a door, set flat into the rock underfoot; and one of the leaves of the door had been forced inward a little way against its hinges. The crooked opening was large enough perhaps to admit a man, or the small nasty crawling things and vermin of the Night Lands, stinging snakes and centipedes, but too narrow to let any of the larger brutes or monsters pass in.

The star went out, and the mists that hid me began to part. I saw tall shadows slanting through the mists, and feared the Silent Ones were drifting near.

I doffed my helm and breastplate and undid my vambraces, that I might be lithe and small enough to squeeze in through this crack. It might have been wise to drop my armor into the crack before I went in; but wisdom also warned me not to make a clatter, so I pushed the armor plates beneath a moss-bush, where (I hoped) they would not be seen.

The edges of the door scraped and cut me; I was blood-streaked when I fell into the dark place beneath.

Of the wonders of the city of Usire, I have not space to say. Let it suffice that there were many miles of rock that had been mined out to form the fields and farms beneath the dome, and that the dome itself, even broken, was a mighty structure, many miles across, and half a mile high. There were places where the feet and legs of the Behemoths had broken through the roof, and I would peer out across a shattered balcony to see the knees and thighs of rough and leprous hide, knowing that somewhere, far below, were feet; and the palaces and museums, fanes and libraries of Usire, a great civilization of which the folk of the Last Redoubt know nothing, lay trampled underfoot. Many layers of roof and hull had been shattered in the footfalls of the giant, back, ages ago, when the giants walked; darkness and cold had entered in.

I found the doors of orichalcum I had seen so often in my dreams.

The images carved into the right-hand leaf of the door were as I had seen them, exactly (now that the memory came back to me) as I had carved them in a former life.

The right-hand door was of the past: here were sculpted images of starfarers landing their winged ships on worlds of bone and skull, horror on their faces as they came to know our earth was the only world remaining in all the universe not yet murdered. The fall of the moon was pictured, and the sundering of the earth-crust. Here were the Road-Makers, greatest of all the ancient peoples; and there were the Cliff-Dwellers, whose mighty cities and empires clung to endless miles of chasm walls, during the age when the upper surface of earth was ice, but the floor of the great rift was not yet cooled enough for men to walk upon it. Here was an image of the Founder, tracing the boundaries where the Last Redoubt would rise with a plow pulled by a type of beast now long extinct: and this was a legend from the first aeon of the Last Redoubt; and twenty aeons and one have passed since that time.

The left-hand door held images from the end of time: the Breaking of the Gate was pictured here, and the severing of man into two races, those trapped far below ground, and those trapped in the highest towers, when all the middle miles of the Last Redoubt were made the inhabitation of unclean things that wallowed in the darkness. The tragedy of the Last Flight was pictured, millions of women and children of the Upper Folk attempting escape by air, in a winged vehicle like those used by our earliest ancestors; the image showed the winged ship, buoyancy lost, falling among the waiting tribes of sardonic abhumans, the loathly gargoyles, and furious Night-Hounds.

The time of the Final Thousand was shown, when all living humans would know not just their own lives, but the lives of all who came before, so that each man was a multitude; each woman, all her mothers.

Here was a picture of the Last Child, born by candlelight in her mother’s ice-rimmed coffin; there was an icon of the Triage. Three shades, representing all the dead fated to fade from the world’s dying aura, were bowing toward the wise-eyed child proffering their ghostly dirks hilt-first. Any shade the Last Child shunned, had no hope of further human vessels for its memories.

The final panel of the furthest future, which formed the highest part of the left-hand door, showed the Archons of High Darkness, Antiseraphim and other almighty powers of the universal night, seated on thrones among the ruins of the Last Redoubt; and while Silent Ones bowed to them; and the Southern Watching thing fawned and licked their dripping hands; all the books and tools and works of man were pictured heaped upon a bonfire around which abhumans cavorted; and the greater servants were shown eating the lesser servants at feast.

These images were fanciful, mere iconography. The Ulterior Beings have no form or substance, no shape that can be drawn with pencil or carved in stone. Nonetheless, the door-maker carved well the nightmare scene, and I knew what she meant to portray.

This was on the right, in the past, at highest part of the door, an image directly opposite the image of the triumphant powers of darkness at feast. Here, golden, was the many-rayed orb which was meant to represent the Last Sunset, which was the earliest legend of the earliest time, and, in the foreground, here was the mother and father of mankind, holding hands sadly and watching the dusk; the man was pictured with one hand raised, as if to salute, or bid farewell, whatever unimaginable age of gladness had ruled the upper air before that time.

I was cheered to think that, even then, my ancient self who made these doors had not considered the days of light to be a myth to be ashamed of.

I put my shoulder to the cunningly carven panels and pushed.

They were the doors to a museum, of course.

Here I found the dusty and rusted wreckage of broken stalls and looted displays: tarnished machines, broken weapons, dead glasses, and empty bookshelves. But in the ruin was one machine, shaped like a coffin, still bright. Light came from its porthole.

This casket was a type long forgotten in the Last Redoubt, able to suspend the tiny biotic motions we call life, each cell frozen, and carefully thawed again by an alchemy that revives each cell separately. These once had been used in aeons when men ventured into the Void, but those who slept too long in them came out changed, troubled by strange dreams sent to them from minds that roamed the deepest void between the stars, and loyal to things not of earth.

Inside the casket was Perithoös.

I wiped the frost from the porthole to peer inside. He was horribly maimed; scar tissue clotted his empty eyesockets; his left arm was off at the elbow, a mere stump. No wonder he had never attempted to find the Last Redoubt again: blind, maimed, and without the Capsule.

A few minutes' search allowed me to find a spirit glass in an alcove; I brought it back and connected it to the physician’s socket by means of a thinking-wire cannibalized from an inscription machine. I tilted the glass until I caught an image of Perithoös in it. And there, shining at the bottom of his soul, tangled in a network of associations, dreams, fears, and other dark things, like a last redoubt, besieged by fear yet unafraid, was the thing in us that knows and recognizes the Master-Word.

I whispered the Master-Word. The shining, timeless fragment in his soul pulsed in glad recognition.

Human. Perithoös was human.

The Master-Word stirred something in him. Even though he was frozen, his blood and nerves all solid, there was sufficient action in his brain to allow his thought to reach through the armor of the coffin and touch my brain:

You came!

“I came.”

It was not unexpected that even a frozen man could still send and hear thoughts. If this method of suspending life could have also suspended the spiritual essences of life, and kept them safe, the star-voyages of early man would not have ended in such nightmarish horror, for the space-men would have been deaf to the things that whisper in the dark of the aetheric spaces, and would have returned from the void whole and sane.

Slay me and then slay yourself. We are surrounded by the powers from the House of Silence.

“I came to save you, not to kill you.”

I merit death. I slew Mirdath.

“Mirdath? She lived and died many generations ago.”

Hellenore. I mean Hellenore. My only love; the fairest maid our pyramid ever knew. She was to be my bride. And I also slew her child. The child in the womb reached out and touched my mind, and told me things I should not have heard.

“Your child?”

No. A creature who carried her off to the Tower-Without-Doors and violated her; things were done to her womb to permit her to conceive a nonhuman.

I winced at the thought. “What creature? An abhuman?”

No, though it answered to them. The bridegroom was a thing bred or made by the arts of the House of Silence, in the centuries since the fall of the Lesser Redoubt.