Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  I could do nothing but blink.

  He said, “Today one of my cousins is elevated. There will be a feast, served by singers, who will chant as they ladle the dishes. A woman from Eastpoint Darkhold will walk along a wire strung between the chandeliers, nimble beyond description, and wrestlers will throw and tumble. In the later hours, there will be a ball, and the musicians will play sweet airs from the days of light, when man lived in gardens that filled the world, and the sky was bright with lanterns, and they were devoted to nothing but song, and pleasure, and love-play. Those times will come again, and live in our hearts, if you come with me now, to my fete: it will be like the Daylight come again. Come, and dance in my arms.”

  His voice is pleasant, like music, and staring down at him, I remembered what it had been like, when I was the daughter of the greatest man in the Last Redoubt, sister to the bravest, and betrothed to the comeliest.

  He must have felt my thought in his heart, for he said, “Do you recall how the three of us played together when we were young? Your brother was no taller than you were, then, and so ashamed that his growth was coming so late. He would wake and come here to practice until the four bells of the first dog watch rang, then he and you and I would find some celebration, for there were always fat-pursed courtiers willing to entertain us, and make the tables groan with food, the ceilings ring with song, and we would weary our feet with dancing long past curfew. How have we let those times slip away from us?”

  “Because we wished for greatness,” I muttered to myself. “Because he was not willing to stay within, here in the light, where it is safe. Because he was tormented by dreams the dull and ordinary men don’t know.”

  “Forget your sorrow, Antigone. Come dance with me, and drink red wine, and kiss me. We will find a cabin near the core shaft of the Pyramid, half a mile from any window, and never hear the night noises call to us again. Is such a life so wrong?”

  My weapon, no doubt because our voices were so soft, now stopped the turning of its blade, and the angry buzzing died into silence.

  I said, “I remember. He used to practice here when Father wanted him to study the ancient thought-records, or work the mathematical tables of the architects. He insisted, even though he was below the age when weapon training normally begins. Yes, Haemon. I remember the days when I was in favor, and people tried to please me. There was a smith who made a child’s suit of armor for Polynices.”

  He squinted. He was about to tell me that Creon had interdicted that name. No one was to speak it. But he caught himself, and he did not say it.

  Even now, even now, I wonder what would have happened had he not flicked his eyes that way, had I not seen him flinch at my brother’s name. I might have changed my mind. I might have stayed with Haemon, and lived a life of pleasures sweet and meaningless.

  Oh, I went with him to his feast, and I laughed and clapped when the funambulist walked on a wire, and I wagered Haemon in kisses when the wrestlers threw rice and stepped into the circle.

  Of course I went with him. You see, the Proctors had noticed the disturbance in the aether when my weapon discharged, and they were approaching the practice chamber, and if they even suspected what I meant to do, it would mean the White Chamber for me, and perhaps mental retardation under a high-voltage glass.

  So, to leave the Practice Chamber, it was easiest to agree to go with him, and cling to his arm, and smile, and have the Proctors step aside for the son of the new Castellan as once they stepped aside for me.

  So, for one last night, I tasted the old life I was so soon to lose.

  Poor Haemon. He was blushing with wine, and unsteady on the dance platform, when I asked him why he had not moved his hand when I threatened him with my Diskos?

  He said with the perfect sincerity only wine brings out, when the bibbler forgets where he is: “Kill myself when I lose her. Antigone. Gone. If I can’t love her enough to keep her inside, I can’t love her enough to find her beyond death and life and rebirth. All lovers will be reunited, they say. What if she doesn’t love you so much? She just likes you? What then? Heh. If she kills me before she leaves, saves me the damn bother.”

  And then he fell asleep at the table, while all around him carousers cheered and called the wassail.

  65.

  I found my brother’s old armor in his old room, sitting in a chest. The lock was one of those types operated by thought, but I knew my brother well, and loved him well, and could impersonate his spirit in my mind and memory, and so the lock opened for me.

  There was a practice weapon within the chest as well, which had forks, but no wheel. But the haft was a real haft, even though made for someone my height, and could hold a charge of Earth-Current. The forks were not sharp, but the Diskos is made of a metal that does not rust, and there was an oil cloth and a magnetic file in the weapon kit.

  There are public charging racks in every twentieth house down every corridor.

  And I still knew the word to open the long-deserted balcony lock down in the lower levels of the Last Redoubt, the one which I had discovered as a child.

  I did not have a capsule implanted under my forearm, nor was I subjected to the energies and training regime of the Preparation. There was no help for that. But I did find the pomander where Haemon had hidden a deadly drug he no doubt bought or stole from a mountebank, which could be crushed to emit a lethal scent. I pinned it to the inside cheek plate of my helmet, where I could bite it with my teeth, if need be.

  66.

  There were no lines of solemn Watch saluting with their darkened weapons as I left. I was alone, creeping from step to windy step, crawling like an ant down the armored side of the Pyramid of Man, following a line of where the armor had buckled, perhaps under the thought-pressure of some assault half a million years ago.

  They say that the world is older than the Last Redoubt, but I doubt it. The theory, long disregarded, that the Last Redoubt hung in the void alone, and was the center of an accretion of space-born dust and gasses, which over long ages gathered around it, is one I now have new faith in. I saw the great ribs of the building where the armored plate was cracked, and stepped on places where no human foot has ever stepped, not since the First Workmen raised these slabs by magic from whatever world of light, the world my brother saw in dreams, is said to have existed before history began.

  Once I stopped and sat on a buttress and ate from the tablets I had smuggled out of a locker. I was not Prepared, and I had recently been to a feast, so the distilled essence of nutriment gave me stomach cramps instead of spiritual surcease.

  I tried to scratch my name into the slab I sat on with the forks of my weapon, but the metal is imperishable. Even the architects do not know what it is made of, although mimetic analysis shows it is sterner than matter, made of a dense, sluggish fluid rather than a balance of positive and negative energies embracing mostly empty space, as atoms are.

  I stepped on to the gritty sand at the foot of a flying buttress.

  I was in the Night Land. And, oh my, it was cold. So cold.

  67.

  A short walk further, and I stepped over the low white line we call the Electric Circle. Up close, it is a hollow tube of transparent metal, held in little brackets nine inches off the ground. There is a living light within, whose properties the architects do not reveal to those outside their order. The weapon in my hand tugged and tingled when I stepped over it; sympathetic resonance. I was also dazed and sickened for a moment. Once again, I was unprepared, and did not know the mind-cues necessary to allow such potent aether-forces to play across my body without harm.

  Once I was beyond the Circle, I felt it. The slow, crawling, nightmarish sensation of despair, self-loathing, utter inhumanity the ancient texts mention. It was the Presence of the Night Land, and I was not ready to resist it. I was perhaps two steps across the Electric Circle, and my weapon fell from my numb fingers, and I was on my hands and knees, my helm thrown back, vomiting a steaming mass of last night’s feast onto the frost-stre
aked slate.

  I crawled perhaps twenty yards away. Here was a tall rock. The side facing away from the Last Redoubt was in deep shadow, and there was a depression there, a sandy pit. I thrust myself into the pit, and lay there, waiting for death.

  The balconies of light above me, the huge structure of the Last Redoubt, filled half of heaven. The sheer size of the edifice cannot be described: despite that it slopes away sharply, its seven miles and more of height makes it seem ready to topple on an observer standing below. The lower half-mile is entirely plated over and dark, so the details of the surface I had just descended were invisible. Starting about half a mile up, too far away to make out individual embrasures, or even the masses of embrasures indicating the presences of stacked cities, it seems a wall of light, merely with ripples of texture running through it, strata of slightly different hues as different races and peoples in the different cities burn slightly different combinations of light-fuel, or use a different type of luminifer. The towers and castles that crown the highest levels, which seemed so large when I lived among them, from here could not even be glimpsed. Only the Great Tower of the Monstruwacans, which rises sheer from the crown of the Last Redoubt an extra mile into the cloud, can be seen.

  Perhaps an hour I lay sickened, staring at the Home of Man. I could smell green growing things, the scent from greenhouses a mile above me, and I tried to calculate which cities had such extensive gardens facing this side of the Pyramid. Gazing back at my home gave me strength.

  I walked and picked up my helmet and weapon-rod, and urged my cloak to its warmest, and I began walking away. I knew that the encampment of the giants was on the other side of the Last Redoubt, near the great gate. The giants were further from me than the Pit of Red Smoke.

  The weapon was a weariness to carry, and I did not wish to lean upon it, lest the metal butt make a noise striking a rock. However, the haft can be shortened, and the forks folded, so that I could sling it from a strap over my back; but in such a position it is not ready at hand. If I tucked it through my belt, it chafed my hip and smote against my knee; if I held it across my shoulder, my arm grew weary.

  I realized that I did not know how to carry my weapon.

  I soon found out I also did not know how to walk. I did not know what was safe to step on and what was not. Some of the substance was sand which gave way, some was rock, which did not, but other was mud-pit, thinly coated with dark ice, which tried to swallow my leg. Walking in sand was so different and so difficult compared to walking down corridors or even across greenhouse lawns, my legs soon ached from the unfamiliar motions.

  The first time I tried to cross a stretch of bare rock, my footsteps clattered so loudly in my ears, that I froze in fear.

  In the middle distance, I heard a soft hoot of noise. It was answered by a louder sound, a cough, coming from the blackness to the other side of me. I crouched down and covered myself with my cloak, trusting in its camouflage to save me.

  I was not yet half a mile from the Pyramid.

  68.

  Nothing came at me from out of the Night, so, after a time, I moved again.

  I began to try to skulk from rock to rock, from moss bush to moss bush, as I had so often seen Polynices do when I watched his image in the glass from the safety of the Viewing Chamber.

  Snow was as difficult to tread as sand, but slipperier and colder, and my boots were made for my brother’s feet, not mine, and the seals were not water-tight, so my feet soon chafed with cold, and my stockings were filled with moisture.

  Then I came across some liquid substance (I do not know what it is called) which hovered just under patches of black snow, and clings to armor, and works its way in through the joints. Once inside the boot, it stings and scalds the flesh. Twice I stopped and doffed my leg armor, and tried to scrape the gluey substance from me. My gauntlets could find no purchase on it; when I tried to scrape it with my nails, it made my fingers itch and go numb. Eventually, I poured part of my supply of drinking powder on it. The powder fizzes and becomes water on contract with air, and the chemical energy of the reaction was enough to wash this acid glue from me.

  The problem was, that the place where I crawled was streaked with long, straight, shallow scars in the ground, which ran parallel to my direction of travel. If I stayed within these scars (they were too shallow to be called valleys) I could not be seen from the left or from the right. But this acidic oil, whatever it was, had gathered in puddles or little pools at the bottom of the scars, beneath little deceptive crusts of snow, so the safest place to crawl was also the most uncomfortable. I also did not know if the substance was dangerous, or merely irksome. There was no way to tell what it was. I could not look at it. My only way to make a light was to force a discharge from my weapon-rod, and I was not about to do that.

  So I crawled through it.

  After an hour or so, the feeling began to come upon me that these scars or crater-rows were not straight, but were slowly curving to the South, away from the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk, and toward the Dark Palace. There was nothing to look at overhead to give me direction, but when I stood and looked back toward the Last Redoubt, I was still so close to it, and it was still so large, that it occupied the whole horizon behind me, and so I could not tell if I were moving directly away from it, or diagonally. I stooped to crawl again through the muck, and my knees, and my legs, and my hands were numb and swollen, and the fumes made me weep.

  Eventually, after many hours of this torment of wading and crawling through this acidic oil, I saw ahead of me an outcropping of rock, shaped something like a saddle, where the ground rose up before falling away into a valley or low place beyond. Better yet, I saw a drift of steam from the rocky slope to one side, where a boiling spring of water, gray with chemical contamination, bubbled forth. I could see the streamlet clearly, for the light from the Pyramid behind me fell across the slope rising ahead of me.

  Much relieved, I climbed the slope, doffed my helm, and washed my hands and feet. I was careful to put my armor back on. I walked to the high part of the slope, so that I could look down into the valley beyond. I needed to orient myself, and pick out a path to the country where Polynices lay, which is near the dread House of Silence.

  The mighty pyramid was shining behind me, and now I was far enough off from it, that, craning back my neck, I could see its overall triangular shape.

  I turned my back, and stared into the darkness ahead. It was unwise to have looked back at the Last Redoubt, for the light had dazzled me, and it took a moment for my eyes to adapt.

  I blinked and blinked again. There were three shapes, larger than sphinxes, dark against the horizon ahead of me. Their eyes glimmered like lanterns in the gloom, and I could feel the malice and pitiless hate which poured forth from the creatures. Because of the darkness of the valley between us, I could not guess their size or location. Perhaps they were gigantic and far-off; perhaps they were smaller and closer.

  Next I saw that they were in shadow. The light from the Pyramid behind me was not striking them. The slope they occupied was shorter than the one where I stood. Even a Monstruwacan at the top of the tallest part of his tower, would not have seen these creatures, because the hill where I stood blocked the view. In the millions of years since the siege of the Last Redoubt began, I was perhaps the first fully human person to view them.

  Then I saw that it was not a horizon behind them; there was a film, a cloud of gas or low-hanging mist, lit with some feeble chemical illumination, occupying the fields behind the shapes. Because the gas was lighter than the creatures, I could see their silhouette against it.

  Even as I watched, the mist trickled forward a small way, rippling up over the shoulders and crowns of the motionless creatures, and blurring them. Soon they were lost from my sight, and all I saw were tendrils of vapor, perhaps smaller than rivers, trickling slowly across the valley floor toward my position. The vapor illumined the valley, which I now saw was filled with the bones of giants.

  As suddenly an
d sharply as a blow of a club across my head, I felt a disturbance in the aether. It was the roar of a thousand human voices, ten thousand, a million, calling out silently their shock and fear and alarm. It washed across the Night Lands like a wave of an unseen sea.

  I flinched and raised my weapon, and turned.

  The Last Redoubt was ablaze with lights; the aether was shaking.

  They had seen me. One hundred thousand spyglasses were turned toward me. Thousands more of the folk, uncounted myriads more, were running to the Viewing Tables.

  In the trembling in the aether, I sensed both love and alarm. I remember Polynices telling me about a dream he once had of the elder days, when great ships crossed bodies of water larger than lakes, but the water was salt, and too wide to swim from side to side. If a child in a day like that had fallen from a ship like that, all the passengers leaning from the rails, seeing the child floundering in the salt waves, would have cried aloud even as the ten millions of the Last Redoubt cried out in spirit for me.

  Great was that cry, because I was a woman, the first to break the ancient rule; because I was unprepared; because I was standing in the open, in a brightly lit place, with the pyramid behind me, and watching eyes in the gloom before me.

  Because I was foolish and certain to perish.

  One of the tendrils of mist began to rear up from the valley floor and arch through the sky above me, the way one might see a centipede rear up its tiny front parts to fall down upon and consume an insect even smaller.

  I turned and fled, seeking lower ground, darkness where to hide.

  69.

  Hours later, flashing lanterns in their thousands winked on and off along the high escarpment of the Last Redoubt, sending flairs of light beating across the Night Land. It was in the coded language called the Set Speech, warning me that the abomination known as the Great Gray Widow was upon my trail.

  I walked through a valley pockmarked with vents and fire-holes; there must have been a belt of poisonous air there, hanging low to the ground, for I grew dazed and sick. Men who venture out carry small and well-made tools to detect and neutralize such gasses. I had no such thing with me. Choking, I turned my steps back, seeking higher ground, but, there above me, where the lights from the Last Redoubt splashed across a jagged course of rocks and stones, I saw first the fingers, then the pale hand and elongated arm of the Widow, reaching up over the pass. The fingers crawled down in among the rocks, feeling blindly for me.