Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  The ground shook underfoot: energies were being gathered to hurl against the mighty Powers of Darkness which pressed against the laboring barrier of the White Circle.

  I should have been mute with horror. To see the White Circle flicker with struggling dimness was something never before seen, not by me, not by any generation history records. As if a man of the ancient world were to see the Sun stagger and tremble in sickness in the middle of its flight across the clouds of heaven.

  I should have been terror stricken that my word had weakened the mighty boundary.

  Instead I was intent on the beast. “The Great Ones behind us there herded me across the Circle, forcing me to bring Dracaina. It was nicely timed, was it not? But you have spoilt their plan, and now they mean to crush us by mere force. Speak! Admit it is true! Your mind is like my own. We are both living creatures. Speak!”

  Draego merely looked at me from the corner of his eye, while his mouth was bunched up around the motionless armored form of my brother, who hung between the monster’s teeth.

  “Why do you serve them? They are not alive, as we are! Why do you attack us?”

  His made no answer.

  “Why do they attack us?” My voice caught in my throat. The question all humanity, every generation of us, has forever asked the darkness rose in my throat, but I spoke it in a whimper of fear: “Why? Why? What do they want of us? Why do we suffer?”

  He laughed. Draego uttered a wheezing strange noise, but it was definitely a laugh.

  He mumbled something. With my brother in his mouth, he spoke, but I could not clearly make out the words. He laughed his wheezing laugh again.

  And then he was pelting forward, faster than a healthy man could sprint. In my weakened state, I could barely stumble after him.

  He dragged the body of Polynices up to the crest of a large rock, large enough that one of the brilliant searchlights from the corner towers shined full upon it. Then, standing in the beam of light like an actor on a stage, he reared up. With a twist of his neck, Draego threw the body down, and began to savage Polynices with his claws.

  I ran forward then, but I saw I was to be too late, too late.

  Draego reared back again, and, at that moment, from a shuttered balcony half a mile above, a long ribbon of energy, the highly charged streamer from an harquebus, splattered against his huge chest with a noise like thunder, and threw him bodily off the rock, to tumble into the gray sand below.

  To the left and right of the Night-Hound were low lumpish masses, which I took to be boulders hunched against the ground. They were not. They were men, who threw back their dun cloaks and stood, weapons lit and roaring in their hands.

  I cried out above the din of the weapons: “No! Draego is loyal! He is faithful! Can’t you see he’s trying to deceive you so you won’t bring him into the gate?”

  Draego scampered back up the rock, and the men ran in pursuit. One lone axman, who had climbed the rock from the other side, stood over my brother’s body, and when Draego loomed near, he raised his Diskos and struck. The light was dazzling.

  With a savage yowling and spitting of black blood from his mouth, the monster reared again. Two other men smote from behind with their weapons, severing his spine and tearing flesh from his legs.

  Draego toppled hugely, wounded in many places. He lay on the rock, his blood pouring down in smoking streams.

  With his last strength, he lolled out his tongue and licked his master’s face.

  Many blows of the Diskos landed at once, including one mighty blow that sheered off his head in one stroke.

  By this time I was among the men at the base of the rock, blinded by tears, crying, telling them to stop. My words were loud and shrill and incoherent. I told them that he was trying to serve his master. Draego was doing what Polynices was not wise enough to do himself, to prevent his own race from ever entering into fellowship with our race. The beast was laying down his monstrous life, even to the point of hiding the fact of his loyalty, merely to serve his master one last time; serving him in a fashion wiser than even his master knew.

  But these thoughts were too complex for the short, sobbing shouts I uttered then. They must have thought me hysterical.

  The man who had severed the head of Draego now leaped lightly down the sloping side of the rock, and he took me in his arms.

  Blinking the tears, I could not see his face, but I said, “Haemon! Haemon! I knew you would come rescue me! I knew you were brave enough! Now I will marry you, and Polynices will be at the wedding!”

  It was my brother Eteocles. He shook me by the shoulders. “Haemon killed himself the moment the news came that you had ventured Out. His last words were of you, a final farewell. He said you did not love him enough to find him again within eternity, your other lives will never be together.”

  One of the Watchmen said, “Sir, your brother is not dead. Look! My blade reacts when near him. The Night-Hound did not hurt him.”

  “See!” I screamed. “They are loyal! They love him! Polynices shall live again!”

  The men seized me and rushed back into the gate, running.

  The most horrid moment of my life was that one moment, less than a heartbeat, when I thought they meant to leave the body behind. But then I saw Eteocles himself had taken up Polynices over his shoulder, and would let no other touch him.

  He ran and reached the gate before me, handed our brother to the many gauntlets waiting there, and he stood by the open valve with his weapon out until I and all the men passed in. They called out the Master Word, one after another; when the company was counted, only then did Eteocles raise his weapon to salute to the Portreve who stood blank-faced with terror, by the valve-wheel. At the signal, he spun the wheel.

  The valve was not entirely shut when a light brighter than any light of the world spilled through the narrowing crack, and a noise enough to deafen heaven roared.

  The Earth Current was released against the enemy, and all the ground before the base of the pyramid was turned to fire.

  87.

  That was the first of many discharges. The bombardment lasted over the next forty hours, and the cities of mankind were without power and light, and all the lifts were still.

  The Millions were prone with prayer and meditation, adding their human strength to the great spiritual battle.

  Only I was not part of the great boiling force that shivered through the aether. I was in the self same holding pen, in quarantine, nigh to the lower gate, where Polynices and his beasts had been kept, and I sat on the metal floor, wiping my eyes and telling myself that Polynices would live again.

  88.

  Polynices did not come to life again. The physicians examining the body said that there was an unnaturally strong amount of residuum among the cells of his fingernails and hair, to which the blade of his weapon reacted. One of them theorized that some property of the Night Land had been preserving the body from decay, keeping an echo of living force within his dead cells for an abnormal length of time.

  89.

  The Country of Peace is the bottom-most of all the sublevels of the Last Redoubt, which reaches a hundred miles into the Earth. Here are all our fields and gardens, miles upon miles, each held in a layer above the next. This final level is a great and quiet place, with monuments to the beloved dead, and floral gardens arranged to their honor.

  There is in the midst of it a low, white dome, very solemn, and a moving highway that draws one to it. Within this dome is the Crevasse, at those bottom depths the white supernal fires of the Earth Current can be glimpsed. Long golden shafts, rank upon rank, dip down into the Crevasse, for gold is the metal best suited to conduct the energy. These shafts by cunning machinery draw the power up and into the pillars and internal buttresses of the Great Redoubt, and send the vital force to all our cities, granting life to men. When it fails, the Last Redoubt falls, and the darkness will have a final and eternal triumph.

  It is a gesture of defiance against that triumph that we commit our dead into t
he depths of the Crevasse. Perhaps the living force of the world helps the metempsychosis, which our lore says allows certain heroes to be born again in later ages.

  Nothing had been changed since the time of Mirdath. The coffin of Polynices was like hers to the last detail, a capsule of substance harder and fairer than crystal. The pace of the road which drew him ever nearer to the Crack was the same.

  Perhaps there were mourners. Perhaps Creon said a eulogy. I do not recall any details of this. I was watching his face.

  I kept telling him to wake up. Like Mirdath the Beautiful woke up.

  I asked him to wake.

  As a kindness, and because the gathered crowds of well-wishers, noble and common alike, were staring at me in fixed embarrassment, Eteocles ordered the road halted. My guards undid the chains on my wrists and allow me to go embrace the coffin, and speak to Polynices one last time.

  The silence grew longer and longer. Eventually, Eteocles pulled me away, and the road of silver-white, without any noise or vibration, slid the last yard.

  The crystal coffin dipped its nose, and raised its foot high in the air, and paused a moment, while silvery beams from below played against the coffin-surface, jewel-like, luminous, wonderful.

  Polynices fell.

  It was silent. There was no noise of any thing striking any bottom, for the Crevasse is very great and very deep indeed.

  My guards chained me up and led me away.

  90.

  At first, Eteocles saw to it that I was guarded by members of the Watch, rather than Cleon’s partisans. It was always members of that band which had ventured Out to rescue me and Polynices. These men were grim and soft-spoken, with a far-off look to their eyes no other possesses. I thought perhaps it was a sign of the spiritual discipline of the Preparation.

  When I was finally escorted to the great lift from the quarantine cell, surrounded by these tall, broad-shouldered men in gray armor, a crowd had gathered on the lift to watch me.

  My escorts drove the civilians off the lift, high and low alike. Nobles, elite Contemplatives, or Monstruwacans were ordered out of my path. Armed partisans with shining pilums were pushed aside. No matter how much space was on the lift platform, these Watchmen allowed no one to share it with me, save for themselves.

  Not even cadets of their own order were allowed. Any officer of higher rank, including the Deck Officer for my home city, merely inclined his head and stepped aside when I was brought in.

  No one told me what it meant, but I knew. I saw it in the faces of the crowd. It differed from the curiosity and fear crowds show the high-born as flattery differs from honesty.

  Despite that there were chains on my wrists, and that I was small of stature and slight of build, the tall and valiant men of the Watch knew I was one of them. Despite that I was a woman.

  We had walked the Night Land.

  91.

  The Monstruwacans had many questions for me, and I answered them all as honestly as I could.

  The one who seemed to be in charge of the questioning (for he had authority to order the others to depart, and he would linger to pester me) was an excitable little man named Ctesiphon, whose special study was the chemosynthesis of geothermal vent-worms. He would pull his gray beard in frustration whenever there was some detail, well known to all those who are Prepared, some nuance of color or shape by which various breeds of vermin are distinguished, which he asked about, but which meant nothing to me. He seemed astonished that any one born in the Pyramid could not distinguish trilete and the monolete spore-types at a glance, and thought me mentally deranged when I said I had not thought to bring back for study samples of the spikemosses found along the banks of the Hot Stream near the House of Silence. My observations were insufficiently scientific to grant them a place in the Great Log, but they were true and undisputed, so it was decided to record them into the Annals.

  I remember I asked him once why he bothered to record my testimony: “None of you believe me. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. One will, one malice, one purpose, moves all the powers in the Night Land against us.”

  Ctesiphon said, “My lady, no one can doubt that seven of the Greater Powers beheld you as you crossed the Land, and spared you. By the time you stood and flashed your weapon and shouted your brother’s name, not eight miles from the House of Silence, and were not slain, even the most skeptical of us were convinced that something was preserving you.”

  I said, “Such was my guess at the time, but I tried to keep it away from the forefront of my thoughts, lest the Ulterior Ones be aware that I had pierced their masquerade, and find no further use for me.”

  He made a note of that, nodding, and then he said: “The opinion is divided whether the Dark Powers acted to spare you, that you might betray our Pyramid to their plan, or whether one of those mysterious Good Powers was hovering near you, unseen, keeping the malignancy at bay. When you rode in front of the Crowned Watcher, and it beheld you, all our needles jumped, and atmospheric microphones recorded a voice that sang a song of great beauty, coming from somewhere in the smoke clouds overhead. Perhaps there is something above those clouds, which acted to hinder the Watcher.”

  I said, “It was not a Good Power which persuaded Dracaina to trick me to open the Circle for her. It was her cunning. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. I saw the sense in her behavior. I heard Draego speak.”

  He shook his head. “Unlikely. Limophoitos is a simpler explanation: fasting-delirium. Your mind strained to make sense of throat-noises which meant nothing.”

  “No: it was a message.”

  “What did it say? The monster, I mean.”

  “ ‘One word away’.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have had many nightmares about it, and finally the meaning became clear. Draego was saying that Dracaina, invited over the boundary of the Circle, was about to raise her mouth and call out an invitation to the Black Things. The physical barriers of our armor could not have stopped these Greater Powers, which are only partially in our continuum. It would have meant sudden, absolute, and instant annihilation of mankind. Death for us all, if she had spoken the proper word to open the Circle. One word away. She was opening her mouth to speak when I cut her throat.”

  I was expecting him to roll his eyes. How convenient that the madwoman who breached our gates just so happened to save us all! But he took the comment soberly.

  He shook his head. “Let us suppose that the monster was occupied by a sending, or by some other art had been granted a temporary intelligence. It could not have uttered the Master Word with its brain-elements. The Circle would not part, not for it.”

  “Polynices treated them with human love. Perhaps he taught them the Master Word.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Perhaps being raised by Man, the monster-beast actually learned love and loyalty, and so could understand the Word.”

  “Rubbish.” He snorted. Then, remembering who I was: “Ah, excuse me, my lady! I mean; that is not in accord with the received wisdom, my lady.”

  “You stopped taking notes. Are you going to write down Draego’s last words?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t write down what the Voices in the Darkness say, my lady. They speak only to deceive. But, I will write your ladyship’s account, and your theory, because later generations will know more, and their aeon will judge the true and false of it, not ours.”

  “Yet it is true. There is a single malignant will which guides all the horrors against us.”

  “Mandragore the Eschatologist is the ancient authority whose opinion is most respected in the area: and he avers that the Night Land acts with greater unity of purpose, and grows more cruel and subtle, whenever a daughter of Man ventures into the Outer World.”

  I said, “Why?”

  “No one knows why. The monograph of Abrasax has been indicted as heretical, but it claims the Night Land is merely a projected materialization of our gathered fears. But if his theory is correct, we could deduce that women, whose
spiritual strength is known to be greater than that of men, merely by walking the land, would more greatly feed the Powers there, and make them grow more terrible. The orthodox opinion, following the writings of Bellona and Autonoös, is that the feminine nature is more sacred than the masculine, and creates a greater desecration, more useful to the enemy, when it is degraded. The enemy does not wish merely to kill our bodies, you know.”

  I asked angrily: “And how would anyone have discovered this? Since no woman, ever, has walked the Night Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful, and save me?”

  “You were not the first, nor was she, though we suppress the tales of prior women who violate the law, lest ambitious maidens like you take heart.”

  “You suppress the truth!”

  “My Lady,” he said, bowing. “When the truth becomes a weapon in the hand of the enemy, it loses its sacred character. When love compels you to acts so heedless that all human life is set in peril, even love becomes an abomination, an abhuman thing, rather than a perfect culmination of our spirit.”

  92.

  The entries were filed under my name. I was brought up out of my cell to the Affirmation Hall to read and confirm the entries, and affix my seal magnetically, and with the concentration of my brain-elements.

  It was a grand and stately hall, hung with somber black and green, to symbolize the outer dark and the inner gardens. All the Masters of the Order were present, as well as a number of Archivists, Librarians carrying their ceremonial lamps, Foretellers with their chains of office, Scholars, Antiquarians, and even two Aediles of the Architectural Board, measuring rods in hand.