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Authors: John C. Wright

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BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)

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The walls of the outer citadel rose up above the waves, vast sheer slabs of admantium brick, like a range of mountains, rising up, and threw down gigantic wings and sprays of froth. Along the wall were salt-crusted minarets and plates of titanic citadels, never before exposed to air.

Streaming like a hundred waterfalls, dark water gushed from the teeth of the machicolations, and here and there, flopping misshapen limbs, choking, lay blind, pale monsters of the deep, caught unawares. Along the bastions stood the nightmare-legions of a race of giants, water sluicing from their helmets and spears, and, with a roar, they turned and saluted the four vast and hideous towers which loomed at the corners of the square outer walls.

When the tower called Madness, sixth to rise, came shining darkly above the waves, the first of the angels of darkness came from the windows, coming aloft in song, foretelling the coming of Morningstar. No jet was swift enough to outpace the beat of his immortal wings, and whichever way he turned his deadly glance, shrieking men committed suicide with what weapon came first to hand.

When the final tower, called Blindness, rose up, the gates of darkness were opened, and all the stars above were blotted and smothered up with storm-clouds, except for one bright, pale planet in the East, now rising to the zenith.

Taller than the other servants of Morningstar, the dread goddess Fate sat in the courtyard of the risen palace, outside the great gates of darkness, raising her scepter and pronouncing the defeat of the forces of man.

All the gates and windows of Acheron now opened, and a pale light which cast no shadows poured forth in mighty beams, creating glaciers where it brushed the raging sea. Thrones, Dominions, Seraphim, and Cherubim rose up in their hosts, and sang what music as made men die if they chanced to hear it.

The Angels of Acheron swept through the air, shining beings, whose wings drew cloaks of snow behind them.

In a great circle around their master’s throne, uttering hymns, the seraphim of evil passed, destroying all life in the sea where their shadows fell, friend and foe alike; and they were robed in constellations which do not appear in earthly skies, and their triple sets of wings clothed their legs, girdled their waists, and shaded their haloed heads from the sight of the imperial gates of Acheron.

“Glory, glory, glory,” they sang, but the imperial gates did not yet open. A great voice spoke from the darkness, saying, “The way has not yet been made ready! Let Earth prepare to greet her master!”

At this, the Archangels of Acheron passed back and forth across the waves, and their wings stirred up tidal waves taller than any mountain. The archangels, like shepherds, led these tidal waves to the great fleet and gathered armament that mankind had placed against them. The waves came against the ships.

All but one of the ships foundered and sank; sailors who were dashed from the decks were eaten by naiades and sea-serpents.

The helmsman turned the prow of the aircraft carrier toward the waters as they began to rise and rise. Raven saw, through the windows of the bridge, a rushing slope of water like a mountain, trembling with streaks of foam, coming toward them, swelling, growing—a wall of water whose top he could not see.

A sound of alarms beat through the bridge. Quickly, without much fuss or wasted motion, the bridge crew abandoned their stations and fled below decks. Raven was carried along in the orderly rush. He found himself thrown into a compartment with a dozen other sailors; hands strapped him into a padded chair that folded out from the bulkhead.

The chamber was long but not wide, and the oval watertight hatches at each end were chocked shut.

Raven turned to ask the sailor next to him a question when a hammer blow shook the room; Raven’s breath was knocked out of him by the jar of the straps cutting into his chest and waist.

The lights went out; orange emergency lights came on.

The deck was heeling over at a forty-five-degree angle, then at a ninety-degree angle. Raven was now dangling as if from a wall.

A horrifying sound, a sound Raven had heard once and prayed never to hear again, shrieked through the chamber. It was the sound of metal in agony, the sound of steel beams being twisted and torn. Screams and snaps of metal rang out, like the cries of dying beasts, and the gunshot noise of rivets popping. It was the sound of hull plates being breached.

An earsplitting crash thundered, and the chamber shook.

Then, Raven was suddenly hanging head downward.

The sailor next to him said, “Well. There goes the hangar space. Ocean’s in the whole compartment.”

Another sailor said, “Listen. Hear those crashes? Aircraft falling up into the upper deck space. We just lost them all.”

“Hope the reactor core hasn’t been breached …” Raven said, “We’re capsized!” He could not keep the fear and astonishment from his voice. He could not even imagine the force necessary to capsize a vessel the size of this one.

The sailor next to him said, “Actually, I think we’re under. Hear how quiet it’s become?”

Raven heard no thunder rumble at his fear; his power over storm was meaningless below the sea. He was helpless.

The sailor continued, “But don’t worry. This old tub is well-designed. Compartmentalized, you know. We should right ourselves and come to surface automatically.”

Even as he spoke, with a creaking whine of metal, the floor and ceiling suddenly reversed themselves. Raven heard a roaring all around him, electronic alarms squealing in the near distance.

The sailors began to unstrap themselves. “It’s going to be a mess out there!” said one. “Nothing was strapped down!”

“Hear that? Something’s triggered the fire-suppressor foam.”

Red light spilled in through the unchocked hatch. An officer waved impatiently, barking orders. Raven, struggling to maintain his calm at all cost, found himself carried forward by the surge of sailors rushing to their emergency stations.

A confused moment later he found himself lost in the huge, interior hangar space of the upper deck. Overhead, great wounds were opened to the sky, and ragged metal plates had been wrenched up in jagged rips. The hangar bays were awash with seawater, and the elevator shafts were pools. Aircraft fuel floated in a thin layer across these ponds, and some were burning. Seawater was pouring out from gangways and hatches all across the deck.

Raven climbed an undamaged ladder to the main deck.

Whatever aircraft had once been on deck were gone, except for one wreck, dangling by its tail-hook from a cable, half over the edge. There were fires on deck.

In the near distance, wreckage and flotsam floated on the waves, and mountains of ice gleamed pale against the dark waters. On the horizon, the seven towers of Acheron were darker than the nighted clouds beyond them. Between here and there, angels and archangels of evil stood atop the frozen peaks of the icebergs, wings spread, saluting the towers with their swords and whips. The ocean was seething with a thousand wriggling shapes, serpents and sea-dragons, many-armed krakens, and swimming chimerae with triple heads, and mermaids of haunting beauty. The angels paid no heed to the lifeboats and struggling figures in the water, but Raven heard faint screams as playful mermaids dragged sailors from lifeboats, or sea-imps capsized them.

A triumphal march began to ring through the air, a superhuman and perfect music. Dark figures rose from the waves, bearing torches and drawn swords, forming a double line leading toward the last closed gate of the dark citadel, a gate taller than all others, flanked by the towers called Injustice and Inhumanity.

Raven jerked his head sharply aside and saw Pendrake, Lemuel, and Peter with some other men standing near Azrael on the runway. Raven jogged over. The scene was lit by the ball of rosy light emanating from the fabric covering Lemuel’s hovering cup.

Pendrake was saying, “We have a second dive-bomber wave coming in five minutes, and a nuclear strike in ten. Are you telling me we must lose? Must?”

Azrael was saying, “’Tis the working of Fate, my Liege. No arms of man can prevail.”

Van Dam was there as well, and he said the coming bomber wave from the Roosevelt and Washington Carrier Battle Groups was composed of over a dozen squadrons, many more than were presently in the air, and that the reinforcements included antisubmarinewarfare systems that might be able to target and destroy the shoals of kraken.

A naval officer standing near Pendrake said, “Yes, sir; but the boys up in the air now have no place to land. And we’re no longer capable of any radiation protocol. And we can’t get these fires under control. Everything’s going wrong! Systems that never fail are breaking. It’s like we are under a curse! Maybe it is fate! These fires …”

Raven saw water pouring out through great portals beneath the runway, lit by fires burning in the interior of the ship. It looked also to him, like a sign of doom.

Pendrake said, “Your opinion, Mr. Waylock?”

Both answered. Peter said, “I don’t hold with this mystical mumbo-jumbo, but this ship isn’t a battleship, and doesn’t carry capital-class guns. We should start bugging out as quick as we can, and hope we’re far enough away when the nuclear shit hits the fan.”

Lemuel said, “All the powers placed against us are repelled by certain ancient talismans; all but her power. If there is a talisman against doom, I do not know what it might be. Our magic has failed. We have no weapon against fate.”

Another voice spoke, and each word rang out crisp and clear, light, swift and sure, as if the speaker knew no doubt nor hesitation. The voice was very deep, like Raven’s voice, and there was a note of impatient joy trembling in the basso profundo notes. It did not sound like a human voice at all.

“There is no fate, for man cannot be bound.”

Raven, and the others, turned.

A golden Titan, taller than the wreckage of the conning tower, stood upon the deck, sixty feet high; and his long, black hair curled and tossed about his shoulders, as if moved by a wind that touched no other object. A mantle of red cloth was billowing and swinging from his shoulders, belted, as if in haste, with a rude length of cord at his waist, leaving his arms and legs free.

He stood balanced on the balls of his feet, legs spread, as if an active, energetic impulse might suddenly swing him in any direction, to whatever engaged his interest. With musing smile and glittering eyes he surveyed the machinery and weaponry intact upon the deck. His smile was one a teacher might have for the accomplishments of a prize student, but there was a deeper joy here too; he smiled as if he savored a long-awaited victory.

From one manacled wrist there swung some links of broken chain.

In the other hand, the way a man might hold a house cat, the titan held Galen Waylock. In the air above his head, floating like a bird, was Wendy.

Wendy waved energetically. “Hi, guys! Look, Raven! Look, Daddy! Guess what I found!”

The Last Horn Call

Lemuel, his eyes wide with recognition and with awe, seemed like a child again, filled with joy at seeing what no hope had ever promised. There was a glint of hero worship in his eyes as he whispered, “‘To defy power, which seems omnipotent; neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; this, like thy glory, Titan!’ ‘And thy godlike crime was to be kind, to render with thy precepts, less the sum of human wretchedness, and strengthen man with his own mind.’”

The naval officer next to Van Dam said, “Who the hell is this?”

Lemuel whispered reverently, “Prometheus. He stole divine fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.”

Prometheus, in swift, long strides, came across the deck and stooped to place Galen near the others.

The Titan’s voice was deep and rich; he spoke quickly, with a curious haunting rhythm to his words, as if the syllables were spoken to an inner music only he could hear.

In a laughing voice, he said, “I see that those who honor me have been very busy here, for look! There are fires, fires everywhere.”

He turned and spoke to the masses of oily flame burning in spilled pools across the deck. “Children! I cannot curtail your freedom, nor command; but if it please you to reverence your sire still, who freed you from the Thunderer’s proud will, and put you into gentler, more uncertain, mortal hand, show ye then your younger brethren, things of clay, distant courtesy, and embrace them not this day.”

The fires burning here and there across the deck flamed suddenly higher, bowed toward them, and then turned all silvery and cold, became wafts of light, and faded like ghosts.

Prometheus smiled and spread his hands. “Radiations escaped from the reactor core! Invisible, but no less dear to me, nor no less deadly; therefore I ask you alike and gently to go. You know you take my love with you, for all the bounties you bestow! Adieu!”

And now he turned and knelt, avalanchelike, as if a mountainside were kneeling; and his mysterious gaze rested on Raven.

“Son of my body are you, who is called, here, Raven; yet I have not earned to call you my son, for no support nor patrimony, rearing, gift, or counsel did I give through all your swift youth. Ask what you will, that I may amend; speak quickly!”

Raven stepped backward, craning back his head. Even when kneeling the colossal figure was too much to take in all at once.

“Can you save us?”

“No,” the golden figure answered, “but tools sufficient to allow you to save yourselves are eagerly at hand. Ask your questions.”

Raven blinked, backing up. “But I don’t have any questions …”

“Then you are doomed.”

A great, thin screech of inhuman hate echoed across the icy waves from the citadel on the horizon. It was the figure of Fate, shrilling like a banshee, and in one gauntleted hand was a severed head writhing with snakes in place of hair.

The appearance of the Titan had attracted attention; sea-monsters and naiades began swimming purposefully toward the battered shape of the great aircraft carrier. Yet they were still many fathoms away, and the carrier’s engines roared into an unsteady life, throbbing and hesitating.

They had begun to outdistance any pursuit, for their engines of metal were swifter than any monster’s fin; but then, after less than a minute of power, the engines suddenly fell silent.

Galen said, “This is more than just bad luck …”

A sailor a short distance away from Raven on the deck raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The man stiffened; Raven called out a warning, but it was too late; the man turned into a marble statue.

Prometheus put up his hand. “Guard your eyes and do not look! Only the one called Raven, the son of Raven, may look; and he must describe what he sees to the rest of us. Only he is blessed by me to be free from fear, which otherwise would petrify you.”

Raven took the photomultiplying telescopic sight from Pendrake, and he looked toward Acheron, while the others turned their backs. Raven jerked the instrument away from his face, blinking and hissing as if his eyes had stung him. “Fate has medusa head in hand. Same as I saw on Moon. She wading toward us through water, far ahead of other monsters. But do not look at her to aim guns!”

Van Dam said, “We don’t have large guns on this class of vessel … .”

Wendy asked Prometheus, “I have a question! How come every enemy of Everness has a thing to stop it but this one? Fate? That doesn’t make any sense! She tried to kill me once, did you know that?”

Prometheus put out his hand and Wendy lit on his finger like a little bird lighting on the finger of a man. He nodded his great, handsome head forward, and spoke softly, his black hair weaving and tossing, never still. Raven heard part of the Titan’s comment: “ … guardians of Everness promised tokens to repel all their foes, even as there is a virtue to repel every vice. If there is no talisman to repel Fate, then does one of the other talismans repel her?”

Wendy said back, “I don’t know …”

Prometheus lifted his finger as if he were tossing a falcon into flight, and he laughed, and asked, “Oh! Come now! What is the true nature of fate? What type of men worship her?”

And at this, Wendy’s face lit up, as if she saw the simple answer to a puzzle. Without even bothering to look, she raised the Moly Wand.

Prometheus now gestured, waving his hand and beckoning for the men to look behind them.

Raven’s instrument gave the best view, and he passed it from one pair of hands to the next, and the people gathered there eagerly applied their eyes to the lens.

What they saw, lit from behind by the lamps and torches of Acheron, wading through the iceberg-troubled deeps, with black and frozen waters swirling around her legs, was the figure of Fate, collapsing like a wash of turbulent smoke. The medusa head she held dropped from her now-empty gloves and was lost in the sea.

Her mask of iron, which had loomed so huge and grim, now fell. Behind, was a tiny, deformed, hairless, pale, and squealing ratlike face, with twisted jaws and eyes grown mad with spiteful fear and snarling malice. The tiny rat-creature jumped from the toppling mass of empty robes, smaller, after all, than a human being, and fearfully tried to scurry and hide itself under the snow of the ice floes around her.

Wendy shouted happily, “There isn’t a fate after all! She’s just another selkie!”

The engines of the aircraft carrier, as if by magic, began their action once more, perhaps repaired just at this moment by frantic engineers somewhere belowdecks. Long-range missiles were launched from the two remaining functioning firing stations on deck; red explosions rose up amidst the endless swarms of sea-snakes that had been flowing after the goddess.

The sea was seething with writhing shapes; almost a solid mass of sea-dragons surrounded the waters all about the risen citadel, which had come up to its full height, taller than any mountains of Earth.

The angels and dark elves hovered in a great, motionless chorus of concentric rings all around the mighty citadel; and all at once the lights and lanterns were darkened. There now was but a single ray of pale and ghastly light issuing from the smallest crack that gaped in the main gates of Acheron. These last set of gates, wider and taller than all others, were the only doors yet shut in all the dark facade of Acheron.

The only other light came from burning hulks of vessels scattered among the icebergs on the sea.

Raven said, “Everyone ignoring us, except sea-serpents.”

Azrael stood with his head bowed. “It is the vainglory of Morningstar displayed. That light comes from the coronet he wears upon his brow; he will tolerate to have no light other challenge it, while he comes forth to glory.”

Galen said, “What are they waiting for?”

Azrael said, “The wandering star Venus must rise to the zenith.”

Lemuel said, “That’s about twenty minutes. No time to do anything.”

Prometheus rumbled, “Lose no hope.”

A terrible, soft music began to steal over the gathered hosts of angels, and then pure and perfect voices, terrifying and inhuman, rose in hymn.

“Hail to our master!—Prince of Earth and Air!
Who walks the clouds and waters—in his hand
The scepter of the elements, which tear
Themselves to chaos at his high command!

“He breatheth—and a tempest shakes the sea;
He speaketh—and the clouds reply in thunder;
He gazeth—from his glance the sunbeams flee
He moveth—earthquakes rend the world asunder.

“Beneath his footsteps the volcanoes rise;
His shadow is Pestilence; his path
The comets herald through crackling skies;
And planets turn to ashes at his wrath.

“To him War offers daily sacrifice;
To him Death pays his tribute; Fate is his,
With all her infinite of agonies!—
All proud, majestic things, he is!”

A chill came across the group at the sound of that music, and Raven wondered if the fallen angels were exaggerating their master’s might, or were underpraising it … .

There was no motion on the deck as that song grew and filled the heavens. All were awed.

Lemuel whispered, a note of surprise entering his monotone: “That’s Byron. That poem is from Lord Byron …”

Azrael spoke like a sleepwalker, but his words took on strength and scorn as he spoke: “The Demon-Kings make no new things for themselves; all the substance of the dream-worlds, even to their songs and festivals, are taken from mankind.”

The deep, energetic voice of Prometheus jarred Raven and the others from the apathy and horror which that mighty and angelic song had cast over them.

Prometheus said, “Do not listen to their music! A greater song, one of my making, shall soon drive it forth. Do not listen! Their songs are false! Aha! Now my chorus comes to outshout their pride …”

Peter cocked up his head. “I hear ’em. Jets.”

A roaring began to fill the sky, coming from somewhere above the cloud cover. The angelic song swelled louder, but it could not cover the long, high-pitched whistles of the descending bombs, the roar of guided missiles.

The ordnance came down out of the clouds like hailstones, by thousands. Ton after ton of explosive, dropped among the sea of monsters, and air-launched antisubmarine torpedoes fell swiftly into the sea. Balls of light like little pale suns appeared beneath the waves, as tactical nuclear charges tore monsters of measureless bulk and strength into bleeding acres of meat.

All sound was drowned by the continuous earthshaking roar of explosions, one after another, in huge masses of unthinkably violent concussions.

Red light from the fires which spread from horizon to horizon now lit the scene; it was a scene from an inferno.

The bombing went on and on.

In the firelight of the bombing, they saw that the mortal servants of Acheron were dead. Dragons, chimerae, scolopendra, naiades, leviathans, and sea-worms, all wore reduced to broken and scattered flesh. The sea was red with blood and flame.

The immortals, however, were untouched. The angels of darkness continued their song, albeit unheard, oblivious to the destruction around them. When they were done with hymning, the seven figures atop the seven towers spread their wings and raised their hands. The clouds parted and the scores and scores of fighter-bomber squadrons were revealed to view.

In a moment, half of the immense air fleet was destroyed, swept from the air into the sea, or consumed with fire; the other half turned and accelerated away. At a nod from a seraphim, three of the lesser angels, out of the hosts of thousands, opened their immortal wings and instantly overtook them; the three angels of darkness passed through the aerial armada, where they pointed, steel wings snapped; when they spoke, blood exploded outward from shattering canopies; when they nodded, planes by the score were instantly consumed with flame; where their shadows passed, pilots grew silent and died without a mark or sign on them.

The action of these three herded the frantic jets toward each other on converging courses, so that their wakes interfered with each other, or closer still, so that they crashed. The sky was torn with a column of flame and rained flaming gasoline.

The seven winged figures waved their wings; the clouds grew together once more, and there was darkness over all.

The pale and hideous beam of light issuing from the half-open gates reached up and touched those clouds. It immediately began to snow, and the fires burned dimly in the sudden, terrible cold.

A dismal wind passed along the breadth of the sea; all the waves grew calm as a millpond. The water was as still and flat as a black mirror. In terrible quiet, they watched the last of the immense air fleet drop to destruction, annihilated by the tiniest effort of the unearthly forces of Acheron.

The gates slowly began to inch open.

Peter muttered, “The goddamn radiation didn’t even faze ’em.”

BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)

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