Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

It paused as if it surveyed all land below with sensations or spirit-forces unknown to man, a blind hemisphere of trembling smoke.

  My spirit quailed within me, since I could feel the power in the entity, even across all the miles separating us, even as one can feel the heat from the smithy’s closed furnace, and know that white hot flame is hidden beneath.

  Now it descended, sliding down the slopes very swiftly, a hunched black cloud moving down the red-shadowed cliffs. Perhaps it moved on many small legs, perhaps it turned the matter beneath it to liquid, perhaps it moved by willpower alone, putting gravity aside as a lamp puts the darkness aside.

  In a moment it slid into the darkness at the base of the slopes, away from the light of the Red Vale, and my eye could not see it, though my heart could feel the terror of it.

  Dracaina leaped like ground-lightning toward the Last Redoubt. Her speed was double what she had previously done, and even her red eyes were wide with fear, and her black tongue lolled from her mouth. I smelled her squirt the poison out of her tail, and it randomly splashed across the sand behind us. Perhaps the instinct was meant to make her half a pound lighter; perhaps it was meant to carry dangerous fluid away from her, lest she be wounded, and her own poisons find her bloodstream.

  We charged past the Great Watching Thing of the North East. It is so large, that it could grow and consume the world; which, I suppose, one day, it will. The great bell-like ear was quivering as we galloped past. In the glow from the circle of light hovering above its craggy brows, I could see the little scales patterning the outer part of the ear, the little network of veins and capillaries, as delicate as the veins on a leaf, on the inner part.

  I saw, like a crescent moon, a pale shadow in the darkness above its cheek move from right to left. The thing’s face, if it can be called a face, was immobile, but one eye, if it has an eye, rolled in its socket as the Night-Hound raced past it.

  It looked at me.

  I heard the sigh of its breathing, a vast, slow hissing against its fangs and mouth-parts high above me.

  I clung to the bristles of the monster, helmetless, lashed by my ash-stinking hair, with my head craned back over my shoulder, staring at that eye, that eye larger than a lake, which turned to look at me.

  I could not close my eyes nor turn my gaze away. And yet it did not slay me. The monstrous indwelling spirit within that mountainside of flesh was greater even than the black smoky hill-thing pursuing me, and, had it bent its will upon me, surely I would have been Destroyed. And yet it did nothing.

  Perhaps it thought I was a prisoner already of the Night-Hound, affixed to her back against my will. Perhaps it wished merely to have me more clearly in the view of the millions watching from the many windows of the Last Redoubt before I was Drained and Absorbed: such small cruelties are seen even in the greatest of the antihuman powers.

  The thing—even the rituals of the mnemonicists cannot clear the memories utterly from my nightmares—the thing was so different than I had thought. It was actually alive, not moving. It breathed and its eye moved, just like a real eye. I had always assumed it was something more like a statue, or like one of our disk-ax weapons. Somehow I knew that it lived, without food or drink or movement, sustained by its own malice.

  Dracaina now leaped up a slope of jagged rocks and reached a high level space, an upland plain, which reached to within a few miles of the base of the Last Redoubt. For a moment, it seemed way ahead was clear of foes: I saw no sign of the Dun Giants encamped against our Northern gate. Dracaina had traveled somewhat westerly as she ran, so their encampment must be a mile or more to the East.

  I shouted in her ear to tell her the way to the gate, for only by that entrance to the Last Redoubt could I enter. My secret way was too far off, and I could not have pulled Polynices up the precarious ill-made stairs.

  As we raced forward in the dark, we came suddenly upon a patrol of Giants, seven or eight traveling in a band; and they hooted and lifted their massive truncheons when we pounded up in a cloud of dust; but Dracaina simply threw herself against the nearest, knocking the vast creature from its elephantine feet and tearing away its throat. Two or three of the roaring shapes she dealt with likewise. The rest were not so near; those she outran.

  A second patrol we came upon: the screaming was terrible, and the stench of blood was everywhere.

  She fought as if inspired: she would not let them touch her master whom she bore.

  We left a scattered group of giants bleeding and moaning behind us, and raced toward the pyramid.

  85.

  My spirit felt the horror behind me. I looked again over my shoulder.

  The Vale of Red Fire is wide, and there are only a few accounts, some of them half a million years old, brought back by venturers who crept near to spy it out. At that time, there were two or three cities of half-humans breeding amid the warm soil and up-jags of rock between streams of lava-slough and there was an ironworks. The Vale is very wide, and its inner slopes are sheer, with no way down or up.

  The hill of dark substance rose up across the lip of the pit as I watched, unimpeded, having traveled quickly across the lava streams and dead inhuman cities flooring the Vale in mere moments. On it surged, consuming the miles, and great floods of smoke streamed from its silent mass as it came.

  Certain small valleys that it passed over, it merely filled with the black smoke it shed, nor did the high hump of its main body sink appreciably, so great was its size. Smaller clouds of sand and dust and black snow fled upward from its leading edge as it came, clouds that would have been sand-storms compared only to themselves, but which were merely footfall-dust compared to the advance of the Great Horror.

  The entity passed over a platoon of the Dun Giants who could not scatter out of the way with sufficient alacrity. Where it passed over them, the living were swallowed up in its black aura without any sound or trace left behind. Some in their haste to escape clubbed their brothers before them. These dead were not absorbed, but their corpses were blacked and twisted where the shadow passed over them, as if by scalding heat or some strange chemical process.

  I turned my eyes forward in time to see Dracaina come suddenly across a rise and plunge into the midst of the great encampment of the Dun Giants. Here was the ditch and the rampart, set with cyclopean stones, which she overleaped in a bound. I was faint with panic, for she had carried me directly into the strong place of the enemy.

  All about were row upon row of low stone huts with their small round windows. The rock was dug up into pits and vents from which steam rose. All was laid out very orderly and warlike, as human persons might have done. The huts in rows, with cooking pits and smithies set at the crosspaths. Before every twentieth hut was an arsenal-pit where tripods of spears were stacked. In the center of the camp, a derrick of behemoth-bones lashed together held up a great platform, where signal torches and drums were hung, as well as a wide and blurry lens lashed into a circular frame, turned up toward the Last Redoubt, to observe us.

  No countless army was here. This stronghold, which had oppressed our gates for so long, was empty. The round windows of the huts stared blankly at us as we swept through the deserted yards of the encampment.

  Dracaina jumped from the top of the ramp to the ditch, and scrambled up the slopes, her paws smoking with little avalanches of dust. Then the encampment was behind us.

  The giants in all their numbers had fled the approach of the Great Horror.

  I looked back once more, and saw it looming over the encampment and swallow it up.

  It rushed forward, as large as a mighty wave that drowns the hill tops of the Quiet City when earthquake or stirring of Forces in the Deep upsets the bed of the Scalding Sea.

  Of a sudden, Dracaina turned sharply aside, but did not slack in her speed, even as the Hill of Darkness behind swelled up in my view, a lesser pyramid of darkness behind, seeming as tall as the great pyramid of light ahead.

  The Electric Circle lay practically under the thundering paws of the Night-Hou
nd. She could not cross it; neither could she slacken her speed, for the Horror was upon us, and its black tendrils of smoke beginning to reach down toward us. She was running parallel to the thin white tube shining in the ground, instead of directly away from the Humped Thing, and she could not maintain her distance from it.

  Even had I wished it, there would have been no time to dismount, unload my brother, and step across the Circle to leave Dracaina outside to her fate.

  And I did not wish it. Brave beast!

  I said, “I invite over the circle the Night-Hound of Polynices, my brother. I grant permission. My soul is a human soul—“ and I spoke the Master Word, both with my voice, and with my brain-elements.

  Dracaina slid across the Circle and the impalpable membrane of the Air Clog parted for her like the surface of a pool. The Black Thing behind swept many tendrils of its substance up to the very edge of the Circle, but the smoke flattened and turned left and right. The white light in the little tube of glass underfoot now flickered, and I saw the shining lights of the Last Redoubt above me turn brown and dim, and, in my teeth, I heard the laboring of mighty engines built into the huge base of our vast home, straining.

  And the Hill of Black Smoke stood very nigh to the Circle, but did not pass over it.

  Like the roar of an ocean, I heard the cheers of the Millions, cascading down from the embrasures above me, and the aether was shaken with joy.

  86.

  Where the Pyramid base corners, the White Circle is near the Pyramid. But I had crossed where the Pyramid is seen straight on, and the arch of the Circle is at its farthest point. The distance was hard to judge, for the base of the Pyramid is dark, and a skirt of shadow surrounds it, because no lanterns shine from the lowest half mile.

  Mingled with the sound of the Millions amid the tumult of joy and cheering, I heard the chanting of Dracaina’s name.

  The Last Redoubt had seen the bravery of the beast; mankind had watched her stand loyally by her master for so many months, and save my brother from despoliation, and me from terrible swift Destruction.

  That chanting astonished me. For me to hear it, over such a distance, meant that tens of thousands, whole cities of folk, were in unison applauding the Night-Hound.

  Surely they were now convinced of the wisdom of my brother’s plan. If not Dracaina, then some Night-Hound in the next fifty years, or the next five hundred, would be brought inside the armor, and raised as a loyal servant of Man, as the dogs in my brother’s dreams once were. The nature of Man is lonely, to live in the Last Redoubt, with nothing but butterflies and ladybugs for companionship. Could there be some primeval urge, a love between man and beast, which even the countless aeons of the Night could not entirely blot out?

  I tugged on the neck-bristles and long leathery ears of Dracaina, urging her to slow and stop, now that the danger was past. But she did not stop. She ran toward the Pyramid swiftly.

  “We’re safe! We’re safe!” I yelled into her ear. “The gate is yonder; I will tell them to let you in. There will be food and light and clear air for us, and surely Polynices will come back to life again! Surely he must!”

  A shivering, shuddering overcame the noble beast. I felt a tumult in the aether.

  She turned swiftly and reared up on her hind legs.

  Draego, the other beast, the male, was there, racing toward us, growling in hate, bristling and yammering as he came.

  The Circle had parted for him. I had spoken in haste, and had not said Dracaina’s name. The Hound of my brother, I said. He was one such as well.

  Draego came leaping across the rocks, his hairs flattened by the wind of his swiftness. His eyes blazed like lanterns, and his jaws were as wide as a well, if a well had many concentric rows teeth. In a moment he was upon us.

  Snarling and screaming, rearing, Dracaina stumbled backward, overbalanced. I clung to the body of my brother, and, by some quick reflex, severed the straps holding him to Dracaina’s hairy back with a stroke of my Diskos. The blade glanced off her shoulder-bone, drawing blood, but either the weapon energy was weak, or my invitation to cross the Circle had granted certain immunities, or the spirit in the blade recognized her loyalty to Polynices and wished not to slay her. The lighting did not stun her, and she rolled and came to her feet and threw herself against Draego, undistracted. Both my brother and I were crushed for a moment beneath her weight as she rolled across a snowdrift: my armor saved me, and his, him.

  Dazed, I rose. For a moment only, I stood entranced by the bloody scene of the two great monsters gnawing bloody chunks from each other’s neck armor. As one, they twisted and struck with their tails: but Dracaina was dry. Draego’s tail jammed into the soft parts of her lower belly, and the bulbs on his tail pulsed as venom was pumped into her. She took his mighty fore-paw in her mouth, and twisted, pulled him off-balance. He fell with his neck exposed to her, but his stinger tail still lodged into her belly-folds.

  She could have torn out his throat, but instead she raised her head high, as if about to utter the cry of the Night-Hound.

  I extended the haft of my Diskos and spun the wheel, catching her in the throat before she could speak. This time, the blade-fire was bright, and all her limbs jerked as the Earth-Current, that substance so healthy for men, sent rivers of pain through her nervous system. The low roaring hum from my brother’s weapon was as fearful and stern as ever I was to hear such noise.

  Draego, who was touching her, was shocked as well, and he jerked his tail free, and stumbled.

  Hugely, on her rear paws, she stumbled back, gargling torrents of black blood. Bloody air whistled grotesquely from her lungs through the torn flaps in her neck as she tried to utter a cry.

  Voiceless, she fell.

  Two-handed I raised the heavy blade high, while the sparks and lightning played across the roaring wheel of the blade. I dashed it with my full strength into the bones and great veins of her neck. There was an explosion of noise. Again I hauled the heavy blade aloft with trembling arms, and again I struck; four and five and six times, until finally the head rolled free amid a horrid squirting of her neck-tubes. Her legs and paws flinched and trembled even after she was dead, and her stinger tail went in and out, like a wasp’s does after death.

  The poets say that Andros the Great could decapitate a Night-Hound with one blow. Perhaps he was that much stronger than me. Perhaps poets are liars.

  I stood for a moment, with my blade still lit and roaring, and the flare illuminated the dark scene before me. Where Draego’s tail had ripped open her belly, I could see amid the mess of blood, a swollen bundle, four or five of them. A litter of Night-Hound puppies, still in her womb.

  Those young ones were few, but perhaps enough to form a breeding stock. I dashed my weapon among them, to assure myself of their deaths.

  By this time, since I had tarried so long slaying Dracaina, Draego had climbed to his feet. He was sitting on his haunches, his head cocked to one side, watching me with a sardonic expression.

  At that moment, behind him, rising into view, filling the black horizon, came a second of the Hills of Darkness, and then a third. Looming near to their brother, the three pressed against the invisible barrier of the Air-Clog, and sent tendrils reaching high and to either side, sinister elongating snakes of black smoke.

  Again, the Circle flickered and faded a bit; again came the roar of machinery from the Pyramid, and dimming of the many millions of lamps on every level of the city.

  I said to Draego: “They may break through, this time. My invitation might have weakened the Circle. Quickly! We must get to the gate, so that the Earth-Current can be released across this whole area, and drive back the Humped Things. The armigers will not wait long, not for me, and certainly not for you.”

  He tilted his head to the other side, letting gape his jaws as if in a smile, and letting his black tongue loll out.

  I said sharply, “Come now! I have penetrated your masquerade. Why do you think I struck at Dracaina, and not at you? Do you think an untrained a
nd unprepared girl can wander here and there across the Night Lands, in plain and full view of the Crowned Watcher, and not be touched?”

  The beast lowered its nose to the motionless body of Polynices, sniffing wetly.

  I said, “You fought Dracaina in the pen, when the Castellan was about to agree to allow your master to breed Night-Hounds. So you slew the Castellan to prevent that agreement, before Dracaina could stop you. All those suspicions you tried so patiently to lull, letting Polynices raise you from a cub, killing your fellow night creatures, all were meant to introduce your kind into our Last Redoubt. Perhaps you could pretend to be domesticated for generations, hundreds of years, or thousands, until some signal came from outside or….” I studied his expression closely, trying to guess his mind. “Or until you understood us. Until you could say the Master Word yourself. But you will never understand us. We are creatures who risk all for love, and even eternity cannot stand against that power.”

  I pointed at the body of my brother with my Diskos. “Help me get him onto your back. You must have actually started to feel something for him, in your black monster-heart. You fell into the role you were playacting. You fell in love with him. Didn’t you? That is why you betrayed the plan. That is why you slew Dracaina. To stop us from taking Night-Hounds into our defenses, to wake us from the mad dream that we could domesticate you. Come! You are intelligent, admit it! You can speak! Tell me I am correct!”

  Draego lowered its massive jaws, closed them delicately, very delicately around the armored torso of Polynices, lifted him high, and began stepping toward the Pyramid.

  At first the monster was content to keep pace with me.

  Behind, the great hills of darkness strove against the subtle barrier, their hundred arms of darkness reaching for hundreds of feet left and right and arching tall in the gloom. Even through the straining boundary of the Air-Clog, I could feel the malice and inhumanity radiating from them.

  There was motion on the balconies above me: many lights were cut as armor slid across several cities of windows, the lowest first. A shadow rose from the pyramid base and rippled toward the pinnacle as city after city, one above the next, sealed its armor. Engines to release the Earth Current, terrible and powerful machines from the ancient days, now opened their apertures. I saw turrets rotating to bring their aiming bores to bear. I saw flags signaling from balcony to balcony, no doubt calling platoons of harquebusiers to arms. The narrow beams of searchlights now glanced down from corner towers, and swept toward each other, converging.