Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  Then I heard from all the windows, louder than any trumpet, the Home-Call, that great and mighty noise sent by the Monstruwacans to warn Polynices of a danger nigh to him. The sound was deafening. It overwhelmed the shrieks of the Night Land.

  Beware; beware!

  Again it sounded, and again.

  Return, O thou Lost! Follow my Call and Return!

  Slowly, the armored plates began to rise up across the windows, and the whisper of the Air-Clog began to make that deep hum which it only makes in time of grave danger. It meant that a Great Power, one of the Ulterior Beings, was abroad in the Night.

  With a clang, the window armor fell across the scene, and the reddish light of eruption was shut out.

  The Home-Call fell silent a minute or two before I reached the floor where the Viewing Table Chamber lay.

  I ran down the corridors toward the Chamber, an endless time of running, silence all around me.

  I am of the blood of Mirdath. I could feel the disturbance in the night as the prayers and hopes of the Millions in the Last Redoubt reached out across the Night Land toward some horrid danger facing Polynices. My legs moved as if in a slow dream, and I knew I had seen all this in a dream before; my eyes were blinded with salt tears, for I knew the ending of the dream.

  I arrived at the doors leading to the Viewing Chamber when I felt the hope shatter and die in the air around me. Through the doors shut tight before me, I heard a great multitude of people all call out at once, a noise of breathless terror and woe.

  Then, silence. I threw my shoulder to the door before the footman could open it for me.

  My sister was already kneeling on the glass floor far below, weeping. Other women of my household had their veils across their faces.

  And dimly, through the windows, I could hear the cry of the Night-Hounds, lamenting their fallen master.

  56.

  Ismene told me later he had been traveling north, nigh to the House of Silence, for there was a nest of Night-Hounds there whose mother had been killed by a blood-drinker. He was seeking the whelps.

  57.

  After my brother’s death, it became my habit to pay calls on Triptolemus the Foreteller. Under the austerity rules of his Order, he is not allowed to serve lavish entertainments, and so he was one of the few acquaintances from Father’s reign I could call upon without embarrassment to either of us. If a noble fed me according to my rank, this might be seen as a criticism of Creon, or showing support for the old regime: such slights are remembered when a man presents his son for elevation, or commendation to the Orders, or the Watch; under Creon’s rule, such slights were also remembered when magistrates convened in secret to draw up lists of infractions against the public discipline. Triptolemus was immune from such considerations.

  He would often welcome me with a loaf and a carafe of heavily watered wine, but it was no better and no worse than what he fed himself.

  We sat in his cabin which overlooks the Mad Library, where books whose thought-images are no longer sane are kept. Here were stacks of insulated cases, sandwiched between panels of meditative cork to mute the aether-noise. Whenever a scholar picked up one of the mad books with a pair of insulated tongs, the recorded voices would cry out, threatening or pleading, books begging to be read, promising forbidden knowledge.

  It sounded so much like one of the Mountains in the Night Land, that I was amazed anyone could dwell in this chamber, much less come here to study. But much of the ancient learning is lost, and there is always a scholar optimistic that a coherent account can be pieced together from the scattered jumble of ruined books.

  He would shut the grate and block the noise and mind-noise while we spoke.

  We talked of many light things, and some grave things. Once we spoke of Polynices.

  I cannot name the watch or week when this was. Before, I was merely entertaining the notion of saving my brother; after this conversation, the purpose had hardened as if by alchemy into adamant.

  It started with a question, which I uttered idly. The barrier of the Air-Clog reaches all the way to the Electric Circle surrounding the base of the Great Redoubt to sheath its utmost tower. The aether-force from the Circle is alleged to repel all unclean spirits, and even the mightiest of the Nameless Ones is unable to cross it. How had Polynices gotten his Night-Hounds across it, either going in or coming out?

  Triptolemus frowned and did not speak for many a minute. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. But then he stirred and spoke.

  “Like all secrets, the key is terrible and simple,” said Triptolemus, “Though the Master Monstruwacan would have forbidden your brother egress had he known your brother knew it. I can only assume your brother deduced during the long months while he was Out. Naturally, I can tell it to you, a woman.”

  I said, perhaps a little stiffly, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the pool of candidates for proposed ventures would double. We have yet to discover what the creature is who comes to stand near the Great South Watcher, although his tracks are plain where he crosses the Road; the near side of the Deep Red Pit has never been glimpsed, despite that it is so close. Perhaps there is a city there, perhaps not; we cannot tell merely from the thickness and composition of the smoke which rises up, whether it is chimney smoke from furnaces. A woman could skulk to the edge of the Pit and look down as easily as a man.”

  He said, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the Pyramid would fall in a generation. They need only capture one, and breed from her a hybrid who can speak the Master Word, and our firmest defenses are negated at that one stroke.”

  I said impatiently, “An old and wearisome excuse! Thousands or tens of thousands of women were captured surely when the Lesser Redoubt fell, a million years ago.”

  “Perhaps their menfolk were mindful enough to slay them before they were Destroyed. In any case, an era when our population numbers dwindle is not an era where such talk as this is wise. Wives have duties more pressing than to make their children orphans.”

  “It takes no great strength to fire an harquebus.”

  He shook his head with sorrow. “Weapons that smite at a distance are an unwise innovation to our times! They should never have been reinvented. Such discharges draw with disproportionate swiftness the greater, older, and more cunning of the foes that slay us. It was your ancestor, Andros, whose bad example resurrected the ancient folly of tele-bellipotent weapons. The Monstruwacans sent discharges of Earth-Current rolling down the side of the Pyramid to slay his pursuers, killing many of them while they were yet afar off. After this, for years, men said, why not have a smaller instrument to do the same? Will it matter if the Older Powers are stirred up by their discharge, since they already bring their full force to bear against the Great Redoubt? So it was argued. Folly! There were many periods in history when the Redoubt was not pressed so close as this, when armed giants build encampments within half a mile off our doors and posterns. The Night Land has seethed with anger for a million years, and the choleric energy levels are higher than other eras have known. They are certain to try some desperate, telling stroke against us, and we have stirred them up to it. It is only a matter of time before someone insists it is wise to take an harquebus outside, using it not for defense of our walls only.”

  I thought it best not to mention, at that moment, my desire to equip myself with an harquebus and travel Out.

  He shook his head, his dim eyes focused on nothing. With a thin hand he clutched the Foretelling chain around his neck, the symbol of his talent.

  58.

  “Creon promises a return to the old ways, and the condemnation of such weapons. He is lying—I can sense such things, as can anyone who knows how to focus a Mind Glass—but I urged the masters of our order to acclaim for him nonetheless. Because the truth escapes his lips, whether he knows it or not. The old ways will return.

  “Do you know how long we have been deviant from the ancient and established practices of our ancestors? Six hundred years, if one counts from the time
of the mutation riots in Courtstairwell, when the last Soul Glass was shattered; less than that, if you count from the time when the other cities adopted the New Regulations, and the multitudes cried out for a Castellan to govern us, rather than sages, using arms rather than words to chastise the scofflaw.

  “Six hundred years is nothing. Some say the Pyramid is Six Million years old; some say Nine Million. Our way of life, our violence, our intrigues, our endless fear of race-degeneration, our licensing of marriages and undue pride in bloodline, and all restless yearning which drives young women to impersonate the deeds of young men, and a young man to impersonate the deeds of a Night Huntsman, all this is the trifle of a single second, an eyeblink, a sneeze, in an otherwise healthy and wholesome people.

  “It will not be long before the fit will pass. I have seen it. Someone will come for our age, a Messenger of Time, even as Andros came in his age to tell the despairing peoples of the Last Redoubt that the myths of the sunlit elder world were true, and to describe the beasts and men of those times, and say the meaning of ancient words whose use had been forgotten. He was sent to put the heart in them, and to save the last of the Lesser Redoubt.

  “I have seen it. Someone will come, either from the past or the future, and be born among us as a child, but will remember the mind-sciences we have forgotten, and banish madness and ambition from us once again. And in that time, we will follow the perfect ways each of us from love and duty, without any need for Castellans to tell us right and wrong. It will be soon, such a one shall be born, and he will cast for us a Soul Glass, for deep as well as surface thoughts, and teach us the art of its making.

  “Creon’s falsehoods will be made the truth then, and all the forbidden weapons will be returned to locked museums, and foolish gene tampering and breeding for the Night Hearing will be condemned. And young women will stop dreaming of how to be more manly than young men.”

  59.

  “Breeding? Did you say, breeding for the Night Hearing?”

  “The Eugenicist College does not seek merely to weed out the unfit. They think that talents such as mine are carried in the blood rather than in the spirit. For three hundred years, they have been forbidding or assenting to matches based only on such imaginary principles. Fools. As if two artists mating could produce a greater artist! It was this meddling by doctors in olden times which brought these genetic diseases upon us. It was not the Outer Beings.”

  Since Triptolemus was the one, in times past, who told me that the Sun of ancient legend was no more than the name for a great searchlight of immense power once used to illuminate the Land back when the Pyramid was newly raised, I am never sure how far to trust these tales of other times.

  In any case, I said, “Yet why this slight against all women? The monsters without us are so great, that mere strength cannot prevail against them; and the most dangerous are not made of matter at all, and cannot be smitten with an axe.”

  “Young men must test themselves against the Darkness, if they are to retain their masculine nature; and also they can be expended without great loss. Women need not indulge in such extravagant gambles with suicide to maintain their mental health. Nor would I trust the sound-mindedness of menfolk who would expose their mothers, wives and daughters to such dangers: they would be soft men, men without honor, full of self-conceit.”

  “Is what is sane for men insane for women? Surely justice requires the law treat all with equal dignity.”

  He smiled at that. “Strange words for an aristocrat. If we were utterly sane, no one would venture Out, not ever. There is nothing more the Monstruwacans really need to know. The date of the failure of the Earth Current is calculated: the death of the human race is known, and dreamers of the far future have seen the Last Times. But we are human beings, and so we do mad things, and invent excuses to make ourselves believe that common sense compels us.”

  I smiled sweetly at him, though his condescension irked me bitterly: “Since I am a woman, you can tell me the secret. How did Polynices get the Night-Hounds across the Circle?”

  He frowned when I spoke my brother’s name, but did not correct me. He had no love for Creon, after all.

  “He invited them.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That is all, young Antigone. All this metal and energy, all these walls and weapons are merely the outer and material form of a spiritual battle, and they are the least important element in that battle. Once we say to the Outer Darkness: come in with me, I welcome you, then all this will not prevail to keep them out. So it is with all things, human or not, which try to eat our souls.”

  He advised me to cease my staring from the balconies so steadfastly at the body of my brother: he was sure it was perilous to health and sanity.

  I thanked him for his counsel, but did not follow it, of course.

  60.

  My months of waiting ended when, once, there came a filmy light flickering in the eyepiece of the spyglass, and I put my eye to it.

  The Man of Mist was standing on the edge of the little cup of salty soil where my brother lay. I could not tell where its feet were placed, so it might have been anywhere from twenty to forty feet tall. It seemed semi-solid, but a blue radiation shined from its wispy body, stronger at its trailing fingers and those strange streamers from its crown which looked so much like hair. There were three dark spots in its skull, which looked much like human eyes and mouth, if a mouth were wide indeed and hanging open jawlessly.

  These entities are rare denizens of the outer miles of the Night Land. None had been seen so close to the Last Redoubt before, all previous sightings had been along the slopes of the glacier land north of the Quiet City; but this one made as if to approach my brother for a second time.

  The mist-man bent at the trunk and lowered its skull toward my brother. Its arms and fingers elongated oddly as it reached toward him.

  Its shining hands cast a light across my brother’s right side. For a moment, the wheel of his weapon was plainly visible in the spy glass.

  Connected to the main housing of the spyglass, a recording plate had been long prepared to receive an image: I hopped down from the stool to throw the little contact lever, and a minuscule trickle of the Earth-Current strengthened the light and the thought-energy gathered by the spy glass, to inscribe the scene onto the surface of the plate.

  Haemon, who was watching through the repeater lens, said calmly: “Take a second plate: you will record a strangeness.”

  I did as he said, sliding a second plate into the clamp, adjusting the charge, and closing the small brass lever that activated the works.

  “What are you seeing?”

  Instead of answering, he plucked me up by both elbows as if I were a child and held me before the eyepiece. My tiptoes trembled on the stool.

  A dark monster, larger than one of my brother’s mythical dray-horses of the ancient world, came lumbering out of the shadows on the far side of the salt circle. By the light of the Man of Mist, by the tumbling flare of the smoke-hole, I saw the monster clearly, and saw the markings along its huge neck and massive, ugly jaws. It was a Night-Hound, of a breed striped gray and black, with a ruff of uncouth bristles running along its neck and shoulders. Ropes of saliva dripped from pale jaws, and the flesh of the monster was scaly and scabrous in some places, reptilian, but bristly and hairy in others.

  The male hounds have a bigger ruff. This was a bitch, Dracaina.

  She leapt into the middle part of the Man. I expected her to scatter it, but the Mist Man was solid enough to make her rebound from its chest. It stroked her with a gentle flutter of its long, thin fingers, and her foreleg on that side went out from under her, as if his lightest touch made her numb. As she fell, her teeth closed on the thin and semi-transparent arm. The black spot on its skull that represented its mouth now sagged alarmingly. With a slow, huge motion, the mist-man toppled back, dragged the half-paralyzed Night-Hound with it. The fume from the smoke hole suddenly spurted up, black and thick, and I lost any further clear sigh
t of the fight. I saw a dim light grow brighter and dimmer, as if the two horrors were rolling down some unseen slope away from me, the opaque body of the Night-Hound now above and now below the strange Man of Mist.

  My brother’s body had not been disturbed. When the trail of smoke from the hole began to blot out the scene, I saw that the blade of his disk was pale against the black sand, whereas before it had been dark.

  I worked the small brass lever to inscribe a final plate before the image was lost to me.

  61.

  My audience with the Master Monstruwacan was granted. The air in the Tower of Observation is rarefied, even for one who lives in the upper cities: the steward gave me a phial of aerial-water, in case I should grow faint, and also a breathing bell as small and dainty as a rose on a stem, to hold to my nose. A special garment and cap of dun color I must wear to enter the chamber, for the Forces and Powers of the Night Land direct many of their thoughts at the Observers whose watchfulness thwarts them. The fabric is insulated, and the dull hue is thought to make it difficult for the Southwest Watching Thing to count the number of men manning the instruments.

  In the very center of the chamber, surrounded by curving armatures like an armillary sphere, was the Great Spy Glass, held some two hundred feet off the surface of the deck. Many ladders climbed up its immense sides, and along the service catwalks and balconies clinging to it were little metal huts, pressurized and insulated, with bunks and mess for off-duty observers. The glass itself was ancient, a hundred yards across, and hung overhead like the full moon of the ancient world. Bus-bars and energy tubes the size of redwoods connected the base of the Great Spy Glass to the deck of the tower, and it was rumored that ancient architects had driven a straight shaft, which appears on no maps or diagrams, directly to the Earth Current crack far below, with dedicated lines leading here, so that, even should all other power fail, the Great Spy Glass would ever be watchful against our terrible foes.

  In a circle all around the platform of the Spy Glass was the track and the engine to turn the machine clockwise and counterclockwise. The engine crew were sitting bundled on the dash, huddled near a samovar of steaming drink, looking up now and again at the signal lamps hanging from the small house near the eyepiece of the great glass.