Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  I saw now why the star had parted the clouds to touch me, and to restore my life to me.

  It was, at once, a reprieve and a punishment heavier than I could imagine: for my punishment was to stand, in relation to Perithoös, as that star had stood to me, and save him. To be his friend, despite all his crimes, all his foolish pride and boastful madness, to be his friend nonetheless, and save him.

  Perhaps the Good Power that had saved me meant to save the Last Redoubt as well, to let the message go through telling where another vein of the Earth-Current could be found in the shrinking core of the planet. But, somehow, I doubted it. The things that seem great and momentous to men, I am sure are of little matter to the Ulterior Powers who sometimes protect Life.

  I knew the words to start the rebirth cycle for the coffin, and how to adjust the feeds to bring the Earth-Current back into his body, so that uneven thawing would not mar him.

  I picked up my weapon again, and leaned on it. The Earth-Current within the haft was aware of the current flowing in the casket: a phenomenon spiritualists call affected resonance. It felt good to have the warlike spirit of my Diskos propping me up at that moment; in a former life, I owned a boarhound, and his loyalty had been not unlike this.

  Perithoös touched his mind to mine again, but weakly. His spirit was faint, for his aura was being drawn back close to his flesh in preparation for the decanting, he would sleep many hours before the lid would open and he would wake. But I heard him.

  I don’t understand.

  “How can you not understand me? You see my thoughts.”

  I see your thoughts, but they are senseless.

  Strange. My thoughts seemed perfectly clear to me.

  The same madness that drove Perithoös into the night was the only thing that might save him from it. The love that binds friends or brothers is no less real than that which binds wooer and beloved. The power that saved me surely knew what a boastful and foolish man I was: But mothers do not strangle their babies if they are born lame; the stars do not cease to shine on us if we men cripple ourselves.

  And I should not abandon my friend, whether he was a true friend to me, or not.

  Men's souls are crooked and unsound things, not good materials out of which to build friendships, families, households, cities, civilizations. But good or no, these things must be built, and we must craft them with the materials at hand, and make as strong and stubborn redoubt as we can make, lest the horrors of the Night should triumph over us, not in some distant age to come, but now.

  We are surrounded by the Silent Ones. We are fated to die. One of us will perish before we regain the pyramid; Hellenore saw only one pair of footprints leading back. How is it possible that we both shall live?

  But by then the cycling process was too advanced, and his thoughts lost focus. Many hours must pass before I would open the lid, and answer his question.

  As I carried him on my back, out past the golden doors, I led his blind hand to touch the bas-relief on the left panel of the golden doors.

  Here, on the panel carven long ago by Hellenore in a former time, was a small depiction of one small event of what, to her, had been the future, now our present. Here was a man without a breastplate or helm, wearing only gauntlets and greaves, carrying a one-armed man on his back; a blindfold (but I knew now it was a bandage) covered his eyes.

  The image showed a star shining down on them, and the gates of the Last Redoubt opening to receive them. Only one pair of footprints led in.

  Cry of the Night-Hound

  Circa AD TWENTY-TWO MILLION

  (Six million years before the final extinction of mankind)

  29.

  The monsters still howl for him, months after he fell. In the gloom, I can sometimes see one or the other, sometimes both together, wolfish beasts with leathery hides and dark bristles, and they raise their grinning, shark-like mouths to the black clouds above and utter their cries.

  Impossible that such horrors could love a child of man, and be faithful; impossible. Yet they do not molest the body, nor even approach it.

  My brother Polynices lies in plain view on the baked black salt of the Night Land. The hollow where he fell has a smoke-hole in its center, some five yards beyond his motionless, outflung hand, and the smolder from the hole casts a light across his form.

  He lies many miles below the armored windows of our redoubt, but even so, the spy-glasses and instruments of the Monstruwacans (those scholars whose business it is to watch the horrors of the Night) leaning from the balconies, can pick out minute details.

  The fingers of his gauntlet are stretched out, as if he were reaching for the little warmth of the smoke hole as he perished. He lays on a slight incline, for a circle of salty mineral surrounds the smoke hole and slopes toward it. His boots are toward us. The smoke hole is to his left. His helmet fell from his head, and rolled a yard down the salty slope. The little trail the helmet made as it fell is still visible. There has been no wind, no earth tremors, to disturb the salt crystals and erode the trail. The haft and great wheel of his disk-ax weapon lay to his right, and the shadow of his body falls across it, making details difficult to make out, even under the immense magnifications of the Great Spy Glass. The hair I used to tousle has continued to grow as the months have passed, and now falls across the shoulder-plates of his armor and spills onto the salt. I cannot see those wild locks without wishing for my comb of nacre to put the tangles right. He was always careless of his appearance.

  Because of the angle of his fall, I cannot make out his face. Did he die calmly? Or is a rictus of hollow terror and despair frozen forever on his features?

  His right forearm is hidden under his body, as if his teeth were seeking the lethal capsule buried under the flesh of his forearm when he fell. Did he fall too swiftly to bite the capsule, and slay himself wholesomely, before his soul and spirit were Destroyed?

  There is no blood visible. There is no sign of wounds.

  30.

  When we were young, my brother and I found a long-deserted balcony lock, and from a previous life he remembered the word to open it.

  He and I would climb through the broken armor of the window in one of the abandoned cities in the base level of the Pyramid. With fearless hearts and unsteady feet we would pick among the tilted slabs of imperishable metal, and find a little niche, about five hundred yards above the Night Land, open to the thin air and stinking fumes. We would sit with our lunch basket and spyglass on the corroded lip of some ancient corbel, our legs dangling and kicking above the smoke and darkness of the Land, and we would hear the voices of monsters muttering and hissing underfoot, see the glinting eyes of remote and cyclopean faces, or feel the dull throb of their malice beating against the sheath of energized air surrounding the Pyramid.

  There was a series of irregular stairs leading down and down from a little ways below that spot, but we never dared to venture down.

  I remember I wore short-pants then, like a boy’s. During my childhood, before I had a name, I was called Païs or Meirax, or something of the sort; the servants called me Annasa, of course.

  Because my father was the Castellan, the nurses and tutors had no credible threat to make when I defied them, or tore my girlish pink bloomers to shreds. Later, when I was old enough to know what grief my antics caused my father, or what pleasure my father’s critics in the Opposition Seats, I dressed more demurely outwardly, though inwardly, I suppose, I was much the same.

  31.

  From the steles we found on that hidden cleft, at the top of those forbidden stairs, we knew this place had been made by the Labdaciteans, great-grandfather’s people. The locks recognized our life-patterns, and called us by his name.

  We knew the tale. Before even grandfather was born, Labdacus eroded the power of the Architects, by making climbing paths not shown on their charts, to run from window to window between the levels, that his loyal retainers might circumvent the blockades, when Architects cut power to the inter-municipal Doors, or grounded
the great Lifts. Grandfather Laius, when he came of age, rose to preeminence on the promise that all such unlawful paths and places would be destroyed, and the Last Redoubt brought once more into honest conformity with the Great Central Survey of the Architectural Order.

  As an adult, I know the horror of wondering if there is some gallery, portal, or open window, unwatched and unlocked against the subtle malice of the enemy, a hole a spider could wriggle through, or a crack to admit a weft. Even we, young as we were, were scandalized to see the breach of Labdacus. His crime was solid before our eyes, as plain to touch as the smooth hole cut in the armor. The massive, ill-made blocks of crooked stair lead down from it as a blood trail leads down from a wound. But it was a pleasing scandal, and our fear made us grin sickly grins, for it was our great-grandfather who had committed, not a petty crime, but a great one.

  We promised each other we would never do anything so wicked as meddle with the walls and wards by which Man lives.

  But we were also pleased to have a secret known to none, a place only those of the blood of Labdacus could pass. We considered our promise fulfilled by vowing to tell no one of our find. The idea that we should have immediately sent for the Architects, or the local Officer of the Watch, never crossed our young minds.

  We were the children of the Castellan, after all.

  32.

  Not long after my age of majority, not long after my father’s death and the ascension of Creon to power, I came to tread these same broken slabs of ancient metal again.

  This time, my footsteps were not as sure as a thoughtless child’s would have been, nor was my costume as suited for the adventure. I wore a skirt to my ankles and a blouse buttoned to my throat, and my hair was pinned up and coiffed in a fashion I envied when it was forbidden to me, but which was now a bother to dress and maintain. My gloves clutched the corroded wall as I inched in my foolishly heeled shoes across the sloping face of the armor, a dizzying drop to the lands of darkness opening up behind and below my bustle.

  The child I had been would not have known me. Païs had been so unafraid, and I was so fearful now.

  Once only I looked over my shoulder. In the light of a recent volcano, I could glimpse the tall shadows of two kiln-giants, their heads together as if in consultation. One of them raised a heavy hand and pointed at me, while its lamp-eyed companion nodded. This unnerved me, so I clutched the metal beneath my gloves more firmly, and returned my eyes to the task.

  I made it around the last turn and came with relief to the sturdier footing and broader step of the ancient and unused corbel.

  Polynices was in his armor, standing where once he’d lunched as a child. The long handle of his disk-ax weapon was in his hand, and he leaned upon it in an attitude of alertness, his head staring down at the darkened Land.

  He was listening.

  Up from the gloom underfoot came the mournful, haunting sound of a Night-Hound, baying.

  Having found his hiding place, I did not wish to speak, lest I startle him. I had the mental image of him dropping his Diskos over the side, or, worse, himself.

  He said, “Rightly or wrongly, the dogs are mine, and I must feed them.”

  I said quietly, “They are monsters. They are howling because they thirst for your blood, not because they love you.”

  Polynices shook his head grimly, not bothering to look back at me. “Draego saved my life from the Abhumans. I fed him from my hand, and he knows not how to eat from any other. See! Even now he will not hunt among the crags and chasms of the Night Land, or worry pale flesh of slug-things from their lightless holes or blind fish from poisoned lakes. He starves, and stands before the gates of the Last Redoubt, and howls his love and sorrow for me. Dracaina is often with him, and joins her weeping voice to his.”

  “Monsters. Do you not understand the word? Enemies of man.”

  “Not these. Love can break even the power of the Night. My dogs are my friends.”

  “They are not dogs! They are Night-Hounds!”

  He said nothing, but listened to the mournful howling of the monsters far below.

  On and on they wailed. Once, both Night-Hounds fell silent, when the Great Laughter began to issue from a buried country to the east, a deep trench whose upper crumbling banks are visible from the Last Redoubt. Another time, the Hounds were silenced again when a deep and monstrous Voice from a cold volcano cone called out in a long-forgotten language, uttering a rough shout that traveled and echoed across the Night Land like a clap of thunder, traveling away to the North. The Night-Hounds were hushed for a while, perhaps cowering in terror, but then their howling and lamenting began again.

  “I had a dream that you would die.” I told him.

  He said, “I will find a way to smuggle food out to them. I do not fear the law.”

  The Great Laughter issued from the eastern hills and canyons at that moment, trembling across the strange and barren landscapes of the Night, and this seemed a fitter answer than anything I could devise.

  33.

  The chief tale of the House of Andros tells how a woman who perished like Polynices, without a mark, without a sound, in the Night Lands, by a singular and peculiar miracle, was revived, and lived and bore fifty sons and daughters who became the ancestors of my house and phylum.

  I should think the implications of this are obvious.

  34.

  To watch over the body of my brother, I stand on a high balcony, some five miles above the hills and plains, glaciers and craters, volcanoes and venom-lakes of the Night Land, and I look over my brother through one of the spyglasses of the Monstruwacan, the monster-watcher, of this tier.

  The Great Redoubt rises seven miles above the cratered landscape, motionless waters, smoking pits and dull fumes of the Night Land, and the Tower of Observation a full mile beyond that. The Night Land is not utterly dark, for strange flares of light, burning torches hanging in the gloom, or foetid burnings from smoke-holes will illume one thing or another, and there are candles in the windows of an Empty City to the Northeast. From the embrasures of the Great Redoubt, as from a mountainside, what little there is to be seen, can be seen.

  Haemon, my betrothed, stands near to me. He is beautiful, with great dark eyes and long lashes, but broad of shoulder and narrow of waist, with strong hands and a ready smile. I wish he were not so young. I wish I could love him as I ought, enough to blot out other loves from my heart.

  35.

  The embrasure is open to the night air, and I can smell the sulfur fume from some lingering volcano miles away to the east, and can hear the soft calls of voices from beneath the Deadly Lake, or the scrapes and grunts of behemoths digging at the foundations of the Pyramid. In the middle distance, between my view and the Pit of the Red Glow, a tall shadow passes. At that distance, the being would need to be a third of a mile high to be visible, and it was probably a Manifestation, rather than something made of matter as we understand it.

  At first I turn the spy glass down. Below and to the east is a line of low hills, which geologists say to be the slag and tailings of the Diggings of the Giants beyond, although the hills block my view of the digs. Nonetheless, I can hear the noise of their labor, the thudding of machines, and see the vapor rising from the warm caverns they excavate. Mathematicians argue about the volume of the hills, or how large is the tunnel they are mining. The work has been going on for perhaps two thousand years, and the estimate is that in another four thousand, they will have opened a vent far enough down the buried sides of the pyramid that the influence of the Electric Circle will not dismay them. If they reach deep enough, they will contact the armored surface sheathing our buried country of farms. Some savants aver the Giants have no art nor tool that can scratch or scar our armored walls; others are doubtful. The less doubtful place faith in those prophecies or reports dreamers of future times confirm, that it will be four million years, not a mere four thousand, before the Outer Beings break in to our mighty home and slay us all.

  A squadron of Dun Giants, the s
ame race as those who dig, are encamped before our gates. They squat in low, round, windowless huts made of broken slabs, which, in previous ages, fell from upper balconies, or were thrown down to repel assault. Our instruments from time to time detect the mutter of machines beneath, which perhaps supply the crude huts with heat or wholesome air. When some noise from our windows attracts them, the Dun Giants take up their mattocks and truncheons, and come stand as nigh the Electric Circle as they dare, hooting and bellowing, and making massive gestures with their arms.

  Three of the Dun Giants, seventy-one years ago, fell motionless, and stand upright, neither alive nor dead, very near the lower gate. Measurements taken over the last forty years show they are growing about half an inch every ten years. In four hundred thousand years they will be the size of the Fixed Giants old records say were once grouped around the Lesser Redoubt before its Fall. Their eyes glitter as they watch us, and no other part of them can move. Already their lower trunks and legs are swollen and coated with a dark crust.

  The sensitive instruments of the Monstruwacans report that there are strange energies building up in them, as the years pass, and their psychometric range passes farther and ever farther from the norm of biological life. About once a decade, the one on the left utters a great, slow roar of terror and woe, as if the monster regrets what departs from it.

  I pause to check the fit of the skull-cusps. A dial shows the protective flow of Earth-Current is steady. Then I bring the glass up to the middle focus, and look left and right at sights more dangerous to view.

  Here is the Northwest Watching Thing, a motionless mountain of something that lives, though it is not flesh and blood, nor anything we understand. It is the darkest and most mysterious of the Watching Things, for there is no light nearby to it, and it is also said to be the most deadly, for the land before it is flat and clear for many miles, with few places to hide. Once, a million years ago, it loomed in the light from the Red Pit, and the Monstruwacans of those ages could gaze upon its great, grim face hanging outside our windows like the legendary moon of elder times. An inch per century, glacier-like, it circumnavigated the Pit, and now is in the shadows to one side of the Pit, and so will be for another half million years. Mathematicians predict that in five hundred thousand years, it will move forward so that the light from the Pit will be behind it, and our remote descendents will be able to examine its silhouette clearly.