Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  I did not bother to glance behind me. The light from my weapon would not reach up that slope. But with my brain elements, I could feel the ebbing of life where six or seven abhumans had broken their necks or backs in the fall, and five more were sliding down the ice-streaked wall, pain radiating from broken limbs, but no thoughts from their unconscious brains. Two more were too wounded to move.

  And yet there was over of score of them, perhaps two dozen, who had made it to the less steep parts of the slope, and were leaping and loping toward me, panting.

  There he picked his fallen truncheon. He held it in his two forepaws, and broke it neatly across his knee, so that he held two: I saw he meant merely to feint with one and smite with the other; no matter which way I turned, he would surely smite from the other way, and have me. I am not a small man, nor a weak one, but I was as a child before this apelike mass of brawn and cunning.

  He stepped hugely forward, and my spirit shrank within me, and his spirit grew like a terrible and hungry shadow.

  The Diskos in my hands now spun more fiercely, and the light of the blade seemed to warm soul. I slashed at him, and when he parried with his two bone truncheons, I merely cut them in twain.

  With a great round stroke I lopped his right arm nearly off. All his muscles jerked and the Earth Current formed a momentary, instantaneous bridge of sparks between this gushing stump and the whirling blade. He was flung backward, three limbs jerking with spams, and he fell.

  It amazed me that he did not die from the energy-stroke. I assume some of the coldness of the House of Silence somehow preserved him, for in his eyes I saw the unclean spirit still lingering, staring at me.

  The monster climbed to the top of a square black stone protruding from the shore rocks, and collapsed, clutched his severed stump with his great left paw, and raised his muzzle and howled in pain, calling up the slope band to come quickly. They answered with jeering laughs and small hiccoughs of irony, but their voices were far too near. They were on the level ground loping near.

  It was hopeless. I could not prevail against twenty-four of these man-brutes. A tingling seemed to pass up my gauntlets into my arms, as if my weapon were urging me not to despair.

  And I laughed, because suddenly I saw victory. Leaving the one-armed abhuman, assuming his mates did not rip him apart, to bleed to death at his stone, I doused the light of the weapon, folded it, and ran into the lakewater. It was an ungainly run, for I lifted my knees as high as I could to splash through the clinging coldness, but I kept on until the waters were around my waste, then around my chest.

  I heard the complaints and mocking hoots of the abhumans in their numbers coming after me in the darkness, puffing and blowing, wading or swimming.

  I waited until they were near. In the utter darkness, I could still feel their brutal animal life-force beating the air around me. They formed a semicircle when I turned to face them. The ones nearest to me laughed.

  I ignited the blade. The Earth Current skipped across the surface of the water like lightning. The noise of their screams was hideous because it was so soft and quiet; the muscles of their lungs were in seizure, and turned the screaming into gasps and coughs. All twenty-three of them gathered to kill me jerked and danced only a moment in the waters, and then the waters swallowed them beneath the black surface. The Earth Current of my own beloved weapon did not hurt me, of course. It was attuned to my vital essence.

  Slowly I waded toward shore. I still felt a sense of darkness in my soul, but my brain element detected nothing living near me. I raised my weapon overheard like a banner, and set the disk to spinning. The living light came forth, bright as a torch.

  There were simply no abhumans here. One and all had perished following me into the lake waters. I stepped out of the waters, and my heavy cloak shook itself free of moisture, and gave off warmth to dry me.

  I came to where the corpse the abhuman was, still perched atop the black rock to which he had fled. He was seated with his back to me. The blood was no longer pumping from his arm stump, but it was not yet dry.

  Perhaps I should have been more cautious, and avoided the thing altogether, but I was curious as to how it remained seated upright while dead. Curious? No, let me be honest: I wanted to look at my trophy. One man slaying two dozen such foes? I doubt there was such a feat in the last million years of the histories of the Last Redoubt.

  So I approached the stone. And the man-beasts turned his head, even through there was no life in it, twisting it around on its neck like the head of an owl.

  The abhuman was grinning, and his eyes glinted like black stones, and his beast mask was transformed, for the force possessing him was the only thing inside his corpse now: it was no longer a him, but an it.

  Before, he had been almost a man. Now the face was something wholly opposite a man, something antithetical to all life.

  The emptiness in the eyes pierce my spirit, and I cowered back, one hand raised as if to ward off a blow.

  "Why do you hate us?" I whispered aloud, gasping. "Why do you attack us?"

  "Malice is its own reason," The words from the mouth were in an ancient language. "Malice needs no justification. The Great Ones could have smashed your flimsy metal house long and long ago, child of Man, but it is your degradation they crave: death is too noble. For centuries they will torment your dead, until even your memories are a torment. I am made in mockery of you, me and all my race, a crooked copy, merely so that you can be told this final secret: there is nothing."

  "What have we ever done? Did our ancestors open up a gate into an ulterior dimension and release these horrors? What is the reason?"

  It laughed without breath. "No reason. There is nothing. You are to die. You scream in the night. The silence will not answer you."

  By that time, I was able to gather my spirit and clear my mind. The Diskos roared like a lion of the ancient world, and the light from the blade fell upon the dead shape. The force inside shrieked, the body jerked upward and fell headlong off the rock. Where the holy light from the mighty blade shined on it, the flesh took on the appearance of natural and dead flesh.

  With the haft of the blade, and a great groan, I turned the body over, and exposed that side also to the weapon's light, until it was purified also.

  What was it? The noise of many voices from the Last Redoubt was gone. It was as if all mankind held its breath. There was some danger visible to the Great Spyglass of he Monstruwacans of the Tower, and yet it was something which did not make the Last Redoubt sound the mighty trumpets of the Home Calling. This was because they did not dare to signal, lest the sign be heard, and their signal make my foes rush in.

  I listened both with my ears and with the Night Hearing. The noise was coming from the outside slopes of the volcano in whose mouth I was. It was not alive as we know life, but neither was it extradimensional. From the echoes as it moved, I estimated it was larger than a seagoing vessel I recalled from dreams. There was a second to the west, and a third to the east.

  Straining, I could a glimpse of the thoughts seeping from the Last Redoubt. The Pyramid was hidden behind the walls of the volcano from me, but rock and stone do not hinder the passage of etheric vibrations. In my mind's eye, I could see two or three great humped black shapes, large as small hills, emerging from the Plain of Blue Fire and climbing up the sheer side of the volcano

  Also, I could envision a pathway, a cloven place in the volcano lip along the northern wall beyond the lake, a place where climbing out of the volcano mouth was possible. I turned and looked with my eyes: sure enough, the light from the many clear and shining lamps of the Pyramid passing over the near wall slanted down enough to catch the upper teeth of the far wall. I ran around the shore of the lake, running as fast as a man in armor can run.

  120.

  I made my way north and east for several hours, and a time came when I heard no more sign of my pursuit, and hoped that I had lost the vast black humped things in the canyon-mazes. I crossed near the Great Geyser, and had a view o
f the Place Where the Silent Ones are Never. Beyond that place, yet too near for my comfort, loomed the House of Silence, its doors opened wide, and light streaming out into the night air.

  I found my father's body lying just where it had fallen so many years ago. The body rested among a cluster of jagged stones. To one side shined the ghastly unwinking light from the Plain of Blue Fire. From the North, along the Black Hilltops, gleamed the Seven Lights, pale as death. Each standing stone had a double shadow of gray-white and dark blue, making a confusion of shadows. There were nests of stinging ants larger than a man's hand creeping on black legs in and out of the cracks between the rocks. Strangely enough, these were actually ants, a form of life with earthly ancestry, and so when I touched them with my spirit and spoke the Master Word, they were awed, and scuttled away from me. No doubt a nest had escaped through a broken window at some point in the near past, and the colony had not remained long enough exposed to the malice of the Night Lands to be changed by the thought-forms of the House of Silence. I took it as a good omen.

  From afar, I could see how Night-Hounds had torn at the face and hands, but his armor had protected the rest of him from despoliation. The electric tingle in the air, the smell of ozone, told me his Diskos was still alert, even though, in the gloom, I did not see it. The clean aura of the weapon would have discouraged any of the lesser creatures from approaching.

  Even my approach was wary, for as I came near my father's Diskos I felt my own weapon stirring oddly in my grasp, due to magnetic sympathy. I felt the buildup of electrical tension in the air, but I said the Master-Word with my brain-elements, and my father's weapon quieted.

  I felt a stirring in the black heavens above me, and I quailed, expecting death; and I put my lips near the flesh of my forearm where the capsule was embedded, that I might quickly bite and die before I was destroyed—but then I saw a thin white line, made of a light more pure and silvery in hue than any lamp. I thought it must be from a higher spectrum than what exists in this continuum: there was a sense of peace to it. Where the line ended, I can not say. It seemed at first to be dropping down from the cloud overhead, as slender as a spider thread: but then as my eyes adjusted, I saw it came from a direction that was neither up nor down, nor any direction the three dimensional mind can perceive.

  For as many years as the horrors have thronged around the Last Redoubt, through all the silent weight of numberless millennia, every now and again, oddly, inexplicably, one man or another who walked in the darkness of the Night Land would see a strange manifestation of something that seems to wish human beings well, not ill: but how it is that any of these ulterior ones could be aware of us, or why they would show us favor, I cannot say. No message has ever come from them: their constituent energies cannot be reduced to impulses falling within the normal psychometric ranges. In olden days, boys flung overboard at sea, back when the seas of the world still existed, would from time to time be rescued by living animals called dolphins. Even though no words were ever spoken with these swimming beings, extinct so long ago, yet they were not myth. The Good Powers were as those beings to us: a matter of tales and wonder. I had never thought to see one.

  It touched me, and I knew this was one of that kind whose authority is over time and preservation from decay. It was as delicate on my face as a spring wind that once existed in the open world in the ancient days of light.

  I looked, and saw where the slender silver line reached, and lo, here was my father's Diskos lying in a narrow place between two rock-splinters, deeply so that I would not otherwise have seen it. When I moved my eyes to follow the light-path, it was gone, and by this I understood that it was a ray extended through a fractal geometry of space, so that even creatures a pace away could not have seen it. It was meant for me, and for me alone.

  When the light vanished, I saw my father's corpse was gone, and only empty armor, scraps of rotted lining, showing where the body had been. Where the corpse went, or how I saw it so clearly, that I do not know.

  Nothing of earth, nothing of the condition of timespace as we know it, could have saved my father's soul for years untouched and uncorrupt in the middle of the dark silence of the Night Land.

  I could not reach the Diskos with my arm, and I was afraid to remove my armor and reach with a bare arm: but I touched my Diskos blade to it, and the magnetism made the two cling together. Once and twice and thrice I attempted to draw the weapon from the narrow place, and each time it scraped against the side and fell back. Patiently I reached again and again, but I could not draw it up.

  Then I laughed at myself, dismounted the heavy round blade of my Diskos and laid it carefully on the cold rocky soil to one side. Now I held a wand that throbbed with living metal, ending with two forks. I took out the ghost-cell, and looped its lanyard over the forks of my Diskos, and the Earth-Current in the weapon made it cling. I opened the stop-cock, and activated the etheric cell inside the little housing. I lowered the ghost-cell with its stop open on the end of my weapon forks, and gently I touched it to the Diskos.

  In no wise did the weapon smite me, but instead, as if it were a living thing, and gentle of soul, it passed into the ghost-cell that which the white multidimensional line had for so long preserved within the spiritual circuitry of that weapon. I saw the charge needle on the ghost-cell swing over, and the measurement was within the norm for a human male of middle years.

  The cell was no bigger than a lantern: I held it in one hand, near my eye. Before I even spoke, I heard the voice of my beloved father come to me from the cylinder, and even as I paused in wonder, I heard with my brain elements the Master-Word beating, low and solemn through the aether, coming from what I cradled in my fingers.

  “You are he," I said, “Not some lying voice from the darkness, meant to snare, but my own father, whom I love.”

  But he would not answer me until I sent back the Master-Word, and showed him I was human.

  The week or more that passed as we two traveled back toward the great redoubt were filled with great joy and also great terror. Once the Severed Hemisphere descended from the clouds, and passed overheard and I was sure our doom had come. Ready to slay even my own father, I raised the forks of my weapon and readied with one hand the stroke to drive the blades into the delicate housing of the ghost-cylinder. My other hand was at my mouth, of course, so that I could bite the capsule and perish.

  For perhaps a watch the Hemisphere stood above us. I could not see it with my eye, but by the troubling of my spirit I knew it. And yet the Hemisphere passed by and did us no hurt. Silent as mist, it went from us, traveling toward the Quiet City by the shore of the Giant's Ocean: and I cannot account for this, because I was clearly within the primary radius of action of the Hemisphere. And yet perhaps it was bent on some horrid business at the Quiet City: for many of the strange unwinking lights of that place fell into the water and were extinguished, and did not rise again: whether the things in the night prey on each other is not well established. Certainly the hounds and giants, which are made of flesh, have no hesitation to turn on each other: but the evil creatures from so far above us in the scale of cosmic evolution, from zones of the universe far older than the visible universe, we cannot determine their actions.

  And then the noise of a trumpet blowing came from the Western Hills where the Three Listening Granoliths rise dark and empty—and this sign is ever one that precedes some great change in the Night Lands. It was one heard in the years before the Great South Watcher approached from the south, and, two million years later, it was last heard sounding before the coming of the Thing That Nods. The Thing rose out of the shadows of the South East, beyond the Place of the Windowless Object, so that the Object was hidden from the sight of man from that time to this.

  I spoke to the soul I cradled in my hand. “Father, one of the Great Powers has passed us by, and done us no hurt—and my heart misgives me.”

  I heard his voice with my brain-elements. “Aeneas, use now the learning that I taught to you, and realize that it is
for no good purpose that we were spared. The Force and Influences issuing from the House of Silence are cunning, but their cunning is not as a man's cunning, for they are not as we are.”

  “Do you mean me to kill you?” I asked in astonishment, forgetting myself, and speaking aloud. The sound of my voice echoed strangely in the gloom, and I feared I had brought a Night-Hound onto my trail, and so for many hours I did not speak again, but crept from crevasse to crevasse, parallel to the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk.

  After I rested and slept and woke, we spoke once more: "Why do you think harm will come if I bring you into the Great Redoubt, O Serapis?”

  “Are you obedient to me, my son?”

  I was not sure how to answer. “Father, all I have done, I have done for you, that I might be as you once dreamed I would be, that you would look on me in pride. And yet how do I know your fears have not overthrown your reason?” For I had examined his thought-architecture with my Night-Hearing–at least, as well as I could without a soul-glass to catch supermundane reflections. His memories were mostly intact, but it was as if his mind lacked both hypothalamus and hippocampus. And he was alone, terribly alone, as I now was, with his weaknesses unsupported by the wisdom of the Great Thinking Machines, his thoughts un-uplifted by the love of the hundred thousands in the Last Redoubt. The harmony of the Mind Song was absent.

  His thought touched mine: "It was to prevent the future from which he came that the Chronomancer came into the past and possessed great Heliogabalus. What is the one piece of craft known to them, unknown to us? What is the thing his word brought about?”

  “The ghost-cell. His world was one where it did not exist until later years invented it. This time line is one where a greater measure of knowledge of the ghosts and their ways will be established unto men.”

  “Ah, so it would seem, my son. And yet what does logic tell you? All those years I spent with you crafting your deep neural structures according to the learning of the schoolmen surely were not a waste: when you emerged from the Egg of Glass, at the pinnacle of the meditative arts, you surpassed even your teachers, even me. Your mind was clear enough to reach backward through time to encompass the record of all life. Such a mind cannot be unable to see the logic of this simple puzzle.”