Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  Some accident had caused the coffins to open all at once, more than the thralls could manage, and hundreds of thousands of men from previous ages, screaming, bewildered, puking up cryogenic fluid, came shaking and staggering into existence.

  During the confusion, a gigantic man, fierce as a bull elephant, had made a prodigious leap to the upper deck space where the hunched statues of the Overseers crouched. It turned out that the large nine-headed Overseer (who we all thought was obviously the master of the others) was not made of stone at all, but of some strange form of frozen flesh: flesh that broke and shattered and bled gray ink when the huge man toppled it from its pedestal down onto the iron floorplates of the archive.

  The giant's name was Bal Nergal of Shinar. He ruled and died circa 2250 BC. He is of the race Enoch calls the Nephilim, who ruled the Earth in antediluvian times.

  The cry of triumph from the Nephilim echoed from the vast black walls, balcony upon balcony of empty coffins. Before the echoes died, the answering cry from countless tens of thousands of men rang out, a cry of rage and fear and rebellion. In the few moments of pandemonium, the gargoyles were slain, the guardian-machines were smashed, and the immense rugose cones of the Librarian-fungi were torn tendril from tendril.

  From behind the banks of rusted black machines rose flames. The Archive was burning. In the light of the leaping flames, we saw, very tall and far away, against a distant wall, silhouettes of creatures that had been silently watching our rebellion, their massive heads hanging over the forty-story tall banks of ancient machinery, their narrow eyes without expression.

  A million men broke and fled.

  127. In The Viewing Table Chamber

  Following the shaggy man, we few fled down the stair. At the bottom, there was but one gate open, leading into a cabin larger than the largest building of any city I had known in life. Like most of the cabins aboard this nameless ship, there was no guessing its original purpose. An amphitheater, perhaps?

  In that place, the eight of us, the last survivors, hid, not speaking.

  We took positions behind some of the tables and machines bolted to the wall opposite the valve were we had entered, and waited there in silence for a time, panting. Every man’s bloodshot eye was wide; every hand was tight on the weapons, archaic or futuristic, that trembled in our grip.

  The air was foul, as if a fire had been here, once. In the center of the chamber was a sunken area: concentric rows of seats, each row lower than the last, descended a slope to surrounded a square floor of glass. The glass floor was an acre wide. Light shined upwards from this floor, smoky beams in the dust and fog of the cabin, and sent a trembling circle of light against the ceiling. We did not approach the light, for it seemed strange, and our experiences with strange lights in his haunted ship made us wary. We were not near enough the glass to see what was below it, shedding the light.

  Ydmos was the first to recover his composure. He doffed his helmet, and, made a gesture to the Blue Man. The Blue Man holstered the little glass tube he uses as his pistol, and wound a bandage around Ydmos' head, stanching the bloodflow with purplish drips of sweat from his blue palms. I was amazed that Ydmos lived; but he soon stood and spoke as if no pain reached him. The men of the farthest future were made of stern stuff indeed.

  Ydmos broke the silence, saying in a cool and dispassionate voice: “Treason is here. They were led to us; but then they pulled back when we were in their power, as if by signal. One among us talks with them. I heard it with the Night-Hearing.”

  You would think a time like this, when one is accusing someone in the company of being a traitor, that this would be a time when a man would hold his weapon tightly. But, instead, Ydmos put the wheel-bladed pole-axe he carried to one side of him.

  Unnaturally, the pole-arm stood upright by itself, like a flag-pole, with no hand to help it balance. There was still a shimmer lingering on the edge of the disk-blade, and where the shimmer passed, the bloodstains were absorbed into the substance of the metal and vanished. I could not put aside the impression that the weapon of Ydmos was a living thing, a loyal boar-hound licking its chops.

  I said, “If you heard it with your brain, if you heard a telepathic message, the traitor must be one of the three mind-readers in our group.”

  He made a curt, cutting gesture with the side of his hand, which I assume meant the same thing a shake of the head would mean. “The disturbance in the aether came from us, but was not one of us. It came from the dark, the under-thought.”

  Ydmos spoke in his odd language, but the hypnosis or telepathy or whatever it had been (which he and Bal Nergal the Nephilim earlier had performed), allowed us to understand his words.

  The language was called the Outer Tongue, for it was only spoken when outside the Last Redoubt, his home. His people had a different language spoken when inside the walls. Since his home, his world, and everything he knew was as far lost in the past as everything any of us had known of our homes, he would never speak the Inner Tongue again.

  The Outer Tongue is soft, meant to be spoken only in a whisper, and has many flexible terms for enemy movements and emergency responses in a very few syllables. There are different word-endings for the degree and type of danger: physical, mental, or spiritual, and one-syllable modifiers to indicate if the attack is microscopic, fourth-dimensional, technological, or supernatural.

  He-Sings-Death, the Cave-Man with the painted face, spoke, “He is like a horse being ridden, this one of us? He does not know what he is carrying? Possessed, but the shade is quiet?”

  Ydmos said: “In the Mighty Home of Man, evolution weeded out those souls vulnerable to aetheric dominion over countless generations: you come from millennia before that evolution began. One of my people could not be possessed unawares, without an act of invitation, corruption, surrender. They know the nerve-energy discipline, they could sense of vibration of alien thought. But you are not of my people: I do not know your strengths.”

  His cool and colorless eyes passed across the seven of us. “One here, knowingly or unknowingly, has bowed to the House of Silence, and only thinks he is a man. Will any of us confess?” he used the special word-form to indicate a moral danger to the group.

  Odd. Apparently he did not think the traitor (if traitor there was) would physically harm us. Was the moral danger he feared the danger his own words put us in, the danger of suspicion, disunity?

  128. The Squire Of The Last Redoubt

  If all human history, from the first cavemen to the Last Child, were compressed into a single year, then Ydmos came from thirty minutes to midnight, December 31st. On that scale, Christ was born an hour past noon of January 1st. I come from an hour and forty minutes later, during the Great War in Europe; and Abraxander, from the year AD 30000, was born two hours before midnight of the same day.

  On that scale, the agrarian revolution, the rise and fall of the Empire of Rome, the rise and fall of three separate spacefaring civilizations over thirty millennia, all were over before January 2nd and months of sunlessness covered all the million-year-long hours from later February to the end of December.

  Ydmos was dressed a mottled blue-gray-black armor, blotched with irregular camouflage, as if meant to blend into a landscape of ash and dirty ice. His armor was not metal, not wood, not any substance I recognized: bulky as it was, it made no noise at all when he moved, nor did his bootsoles ring against the deck.

  A wide mantle of gray fabric rippled from his shoulder-plates. Even from a pace or two away, I could feel the heat radiating from it, as if from a stove. It was made for a clime colder than the arctic.

  His helmet was also blue-gray, with cheekplates, crown, and the skirt around the back to protect the neck, were all one featureless curving surface of dull hue. His people put no decoration on their helmets: no plumes, no brave crests. There was neither beaver nor visor, but he must have had some method of opening and shutting the Y-shaped gap in the front, where his large eyes and solemn mouth were sometimes visible. I never saw it change,
but sometimes the opening seemed covered over with transparent metal, sometimes it seemed merely an empty opening. In battle, the opening vanished, and the face of the helm was blind and blank, and I do not know how he saw his target.

  There were no visible joints anywhere in the armor, though it was bulky and hard. If you were looking right at his elbow when he swung his ponderous weapon, sometimes the light would ripple slightly at the joint-surface, as if the metal itself were changing shape, or made of something both finer and harder than mere matter. I wondered if the armor was alive, as the disk-weapon was.

  I had seen the stinger-tail of a Mantachore bounce off that breastplate: I doubted my shell could penetrate it. I also have a machete that Abraxander dreamed into matter for me: but there was no way my one-handed blade could parry the forty or fifty pounds of spinning, electrically-charged buzz-saw battle-axe thing that Ydmos swung with his mighty arms.

  I concluded that if Ydmos thought I was the traitor, I would not live long. Since I had seen his pole-arm, as if by magnetic pull, jump into his hand when needed, I was not comforted by his pretending to place it beyond his reach.

  129. I Am Vouched For

  He-Sings-Death is tall and thin, dark-skinned with lank, dark hair, which he braids and decorates with bones and beads and feathers. His face is stained with woad, and his jacket is uncured leather from a red deer. His dirk is dark flint, and hangs from a lanyard and thong about his neck; his javelins are tipped with flint as well. I thought it odd that he asked for paint and feathers from Abraxander-the-Threshold when the matter-wizard was trying to materialize our gear for us: I suppose he thought it odd that I asked for a shaving-razor.

  He throws his spear with a lever called an atlatl or woomera. It is about two feet long, with a handgrip at one end and a spur at the other. I have seen him hit a monster square in the eye at 150 yards with a javelin launched from it.

  The Blue Man says He-Sings-Death hails from 14,500 BC. Once, when we were encamped in a dark box near an empty stairwell, He-Sings-Death used his remaining woad dye to paint the walls with beautiful pictures of an Irish Elk in flight. With only three colors, chalk-white, indigo and dull red, He-Sings-Death made the majestic antlers, the shining coats, the bunched muscles of the fleet-footed Elk come alive. It was a painting by someone who saw and hunted and admired the beast. The last of them vanished 11,000 years before my time. He-Sings-Death "signed" the painting by leaving a blue handprint.

  On the opposite wall, he painted a hulking shape of the kiln giants that had been following us, and he used this for target practice: "so that the tooth of the spear will come to know the taste of him, and yearn to strike true!” he said, and laughed. He laughs the way a child might, tossing his hair and throwing his head back.

  He spoke to the flint spear-points of his weapons, praising them when they struck, and chiding them when they did not. Perhaps it was a voodoo he believed in earnest; perhaps it was target-practice; perhaps it was merely his sense of humor.

  He laughed now. “Ydmos, he says there is one here. One here who follows the Smothering Man, He-Chokes-Song. But Ydmos, he hears in the night. He knows. He sees hearts. So, then! So, then! Who can he not hear? Who has a hidden heart?”

  I knew from previous talks with him, that the devil of his tribal lore was called He-Chokes-Song. This was a spirit of darkness, born of the waste left over after the Creator made the world on the pottery wheel of the rotating heavens. The left-over spirit stuff could find no place in the world for itself, and so bent itself to the task of tormenting and destroying the happy men who did have a place in the world. It was the not unreasonable conclusion of He-Sings-Death that we were in a cave where this devil and his servants, corrupted from once-wholesome creatures, dwelled.

  Ydmos did have some sort of telepathy he called "Night-Hearing" that the men of the far future used to sense the shape and nature of the menaces from the Night Lands around their Last Redoubt. He-Sings-Death was asking a rather clever question: which one of us could block the Night-Hearing, the telepathy, of Ydmos?

  He-Sings-Death now made a shuffling dance with his doe-skin-clad feet, turning this and that. He held his spear in hand, in its thrower, at his shoulder, so that the long shaft slanted down his back. He chanted in a high, thin, funny-sounding voice "Who can it be? Who can it be?” and bent his head as if to stare in surprise at his own feet in their rapid slithering patter. I do not know if he meant this to work a magic, but he was smiling as he danced, a smile I have seen on him when he makes a joke.

  Now he stood in the middle of our rough circle. We were all staring at him. His back was to me. He straightened up.

  He-Sings-Death said, “Not Captain Powell. His heart is bright: he has the eye of the hunting-dog when he hunts; he holds the iron thunder. Did you not see the black beasts flee when the thunder spoke?”

  Ydmos said, “Do not praise his noisy weapon: the creatures of the Night Lands are drawn to loud reports, and firearms tempt men to slay monsters afar-off, instead of close at hand. Such weapons anger what should be left quiet.”

  I thought this a cold thing to say, considering that I had just saved his life with my firearm. But I decided that a polite reply was best. “No matter the temptation, sir, I will only be tempted five more times to slay a monster far off. I have but six shells left, and I am saving the last one for myself. Unless Mr. Threshold can make more?” (Casually, I looked toward Abraxander) “Can you, sir? Or can any of you make us better arms, or restore our supplies? Some of you are warlocks and who-knows-what. Mr. Bliss the Blue Man seems to be able to create tools out of his fluid.” (Casually, I pointed my barrel toward the Blue Man) “Or perhaps master Kitimil the Shaggy Man (if man he be) he could teach us to make clubs from bone.”

  I raised my voice (for the shaggy man was squatting on the top of some oblong metal casket, gazing toward the center of the room). “What are you anyway? A Neanderthal? Or something from the end of the world?”

  The Blue Man and Abraxander-the-Threshold turned to look at Kitimil, as if expecting a reply.

  130. The Shaggy Man

  Kitimil, the Shaggy Man, did not answer. He did not seem overly concerned at the idea of a traitor in our midst. He was a squat fellow, but so thick through the shoulders and chest as to look almost hunch-backed. He sniffed the air with his monkey-nose.

  When I spoke, a long moment passed before he cocked his head at me.

  I think Kitimil is one of the three members of the group who reads minds, but I cannot decipher his expressions. His eyes are as green as jade, and they shine from between the hairs of his unkept brow like the eyes of a tiger crouched in the tall grass of Rhodesia.

  His brow is heavy and cragged like the brow of an ape, so that his eyes are always in shadow, wolf-green staring out from dark pits. His face is wide at the cheekbones, and through the tangled black beard, ribs of muscle surrounded a wide, dog-fanged mouth. His jaw was like a blunt anvil. His weapon was the thighbone of an antelope: he dressed in shaggy wolf hide. I would swear he was homonid of some other species than our own, save that I have seen sailors on packet boats out of Istanbul or Macao as thick-featured, hard-faced, wild and dark as he.

  He spoke in his language of coughs and clicks. Once again, the spiritualistic or animal-magnetic process of whatever it was that Ydmos and Nergal had done before translated the words for us.

  The shaggy man was saying: “What is that light? What is that light?”

  He came up onto his hind legs, and raised his bone truncheon and pointed, he said, “It is the light of the last sun. All-of-all now dies. Night-of-night now falls. There will be no dawn. In the hunting band, the virgins carry a coal from fire to fire, that when one fire dies, another will be born. Where is the coal for the new dawn? Who will make the new all-of-all?”

  He coughed (a laugh? Or a sound of sorrow?) and concluded: “Why these people? Why this place? The path, it leads through dark brush, dark and tangled, but there is sun in the glade beyond. My mate, Magigi, waits. We dance then.
Then, the light. Not now, the light: the dark is now.

  “Who carries the coal to bring back the fire of the world? For the path is full of thorns.”

  This was the most he had spoken since he pulled me from my library coffin. I wondered at his words. His mate?

  And, when no one answered him, he turned his face from us with a snort of disgust, and stared back toward the shimmering light. He muttered, as if to himself, “You are forgetting people, after-people, wrong-head-looking people. The coal is here with us. Do not look for the serpent among us: he is nothing.”

  He-Sings-Death laughed again and stamped his feet on the deck, making a dull drum-boom. We all looked back toward him.

  He-Sings-Death was saying, “Kitimil, I name him He-Speaks-Like-Man. He is crooked-hearted, but his heart is plain. His heart is wet with tears. Can He-Chokes-Song cry human tears? Not him! Not him! Why do you look at him?”

  I took this to mean that He-Sings-Death was vouching for Kitimil as well. But I wondered who among us would vouch for He-Sings-Death? Of all the company, he was my closest comrade, but he could not truly know that I was not infected by the enemy, possessed, ghost-ridden, no more than I could know it of him.

  He-Sings-Death spoke in a deeper voice, harshly. “But here is one whose heart is hidden and dark. He hears voices, and he obeys. Is this not a way of the Smothering Man? Let him show himself to be clean! Speak!”

  He was facing Mneseus, the Sorcerer-King from Atlantis.

  He-Sings-Death drew back his spear-hand and raised his weapon to smite.

  131. King Of The Drowned Land

  Mneseus of Atlantis had not spoken since the battle. He sat, his unstrung bowstaff in hand, on the edge of a machine housing, but his head was bowed, and his left hand covered his face.

  Slowly, he raised his face. His eyes were wet and red.

  Mneseus said: “I shall speak. Noble sirs, ghosts of the future, my descendants, hear me: it is seen that there were neither bride nor child among those stirred again to life in the dark coffins. Is it not strange, that men only were brought to life, and no sister, no daughter, no mother of our race, glancing-eyed, dark-haired, with shining limbs?