Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  “We are not in the universe?”

  “No. There must be some outside place for the scaffold to stand.”

  “And this house?”

  “This is the House of Silence. In your era, it stands in the west of Ireland, near a village called Kraighten. It is swallowed by the Earth, so that, in the time of Ydmos, it will be present when the earth is shattered to her core. There will be a great valley, warmed by the last ember of dying geothermal heat, where the Last Redoubt rises; and the House of Silence stands on a small hill to the north. Their poets say the doors of this house have never been closed since all eternity: but there are many times, years and centuries at a time, when the doors close and nothing from the Night World enters the three dimensions occupied by man. Each time, the doors open for you.”

  “What is in this house?”

  “Everything. The seed of all time and space is within, waiting to begin its growth. And outside …”

  He made a gesture, pointing to the slopes.

  At first, I thought they were statues, sphinxes built of an unimaginable scale. I could not calculate the size; they were on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the crater, and so must have been hundreds or thousands of miles away from me. Something as far off as the Moon is visible to the naked eye, but only if it is as large as the Moon.

  But no; they were not statues. Every few miles, peering from behind the Everest-sized hills and hillocks of those endless, immense slopes that surrounded the crater, were vast and inhuman faces, staring eyes. Godlike visages, you could call them, but only if gods were bent utterly on cruel and dark and inhuman purposes. One of them had the head of a jackal; another wore a necklace of skulls, and held up many weapons in many arms. Others looked like the monsters and grotesques from Polynesian totems, or the squat and ugly carvings from buried Aztec temples.

  I said, “They are waiting to enter in. I will not open the door for them.”

  He shook his head, and showed his fangs: an expression of sardonic pity. “I have said before: you are not the one who opens it. It cannot be opened from this side. It is opened for you.”

  I heard, very softly, a footstep behind the door, as if some slight figure were coming down the stairs to a main hall, approaching.

  A woman’s footstep.

  I remembered the horrid image of the iron spaceship hull, surrounding me, closing in. I thought once again of what a two-dimensional man, living in the surface of a balloon, might see, how it might look to him, if the balloon were turned inside-out.

  I said, “If it is larger on the inside, then, no matter what this seems to look like, these—these giant blocks—these are the inner walls. This endless plain out here is not the outside. It is the inside, a tomb, perhaps, or a prison-cell.”

  He pointed with his bone truncheon. In the far distance, with no noise at all, the jackal-headed giant, taller than the tallest mountain of earth, had risen to its monstrous feet. The other huge and terrible figures were still recumbent. I cannot express how inhuman, even now, when one of them had moved, was the sense of the pressure of eternity here: the utter, absolute stillness of the watchers was oppressive, like staring at the dark place between the stars on a moonless night, and realizing your eyes were showing you a night with no further shore to it, an abyss without bounds. If that abyss could turn and look at you, it would wear such as face as these watching things.

  “These are gods. Who could imprison them?”

  I said, “Who indeed? There is a way out of this trap.”

  “No. Even if you kill yourself, you only end up back here. This is where those who kill themselves are sent.”

  I pointed at the hideous outer gods watching us with unblinking eyes from the vast slopes of the red-lit crater walls. “And them?”

  “They destroyed the first universe, and themselves, because they hated it. Call that rebellion, if you wish, but it is something far worse. It is the malice that is utterly selfless, willing to die, merely so that the object of your malice might suffer.”

  I remembered what Lisa said about the insult to all life a suicide committed. “Life threw them out of her house.”

  “You think it is a punishment? A river is not punished for falling downhill to merge and be swallowed by the sea.”

  I said, “And you and I are here because…”

  “We trafficked with them. We made a bargain. When you were Enoch. When I was Uj. We stepped outside of time, and they were waiting there. So, is there a way out of the trap? This trap is the size of the universe.”

  “I could kill you. You said your memories were needed to complete the recreation, to make the new universe like the old one.”

  “And so you could have done, back aboard the Spirit of Man. But here? My part of this work was done. I called the ghost aboard the ship; you embraced her. Nothing more is needed.”

  “At least you will pay for your part in this!” I lift up the heavy pole. The disk in the tines at the head of the pole-arm began to spin, and it made a low, rumbling roar. White light flashed from the spinning blade, revealing, for a moment, the hideous redness all around us. In the white light, the face of Kitimil seemed young, unlined, untroubled. He showed his fangs and laughed.

  “They granted me that I should live again, ever and forever, and that Magigi would come to me again. Strike! I am unarmed.” He threw the bone truncheon from his hand, so that it fell down the steps of the porch and landed in the ash of the red crater floor.

  I doused the weapon and lowered it. I had the memories of Ydmos in me: the wrongness of using this weapon against anything but a monster stayed my hand.

  I looked out at the giants, the fallen gods, the creatures of darkness. Even Ydmos would not take up his weapon where he was so overmatched. Smiting a Night-Hound was possible; smiting a creature the size of a mountain was comical; smiting a four- or five- or thousand-dimensional being was inconceivable. It would be like trying to hit Time with a stick, or the abstract concept of Life, or shoot the Color Blue, or snare the blast from a trumpet in a fisherman’s net.

  There was a noise from behind the low, thick door to the House. A scrape of metal; as if someone were fumbling with the key.

  In the remote distance, the jackal-headed god had raised his hand. A company of abhuman creatures, swine-headed and loathsome to the eye, came trotting around the wing of the House. They walked on two feet, like men, and carried axes and maces in their paws. When the leader of the band saw me, it threw back its snout and gave a high-pitched squeal of rage and hate. The other abhumans snorted and grunted with pleasure and bloodlust, and the group broke into a run, coming for the stairs to the porch.

  I put the Diskos to one side. It stood upright, hovering a half inch off the ground, waiting. I rotated my other weapon into being in my hands, raised my trusty Holland and Holland rifle, took aim at the leader of the swine-things, and shot.

  I killed two more before they were upon me. The Diskos jumped back into my hands; I swung the mighty weapon and tore a swine-creature in half. Lightning sizzled from the blade, jarring and shocking swine-men touching the one I bisected. Bloodstains were on the ceiling above me: I swung the pole-arm left and right, chopping off limbs and heads….

  I was knocked from my feet. A swine-man broke his dagger against the stubborn armor of my chest; but the stink of his breath was in my nostrils; I could see the tiny hairs of his bristles around his white eyes, the fluid down the twin tubes of his ugly nose, the foam on his tusks….

  The door behind me shivered in its frame. A crack of light appeared, running from the top of the doorframe to the threshold. A low, thin, piercing cry (which I heard even above the roar of my disk-weapon, above the hideous pig-squealing of the abhumans) echoed from the distant Watchers. They had waited an eternity. They had waited for an entire universe to grow old and die. They had waited for this moment.

  Two of the swine-men wrestled the Diskos from my grasp. The weapon shocked them, and they fell, theirs paws burnt and bloody from where they had touched
the haft. The memories of Ydmos stirred in my memory: and I wondered from where the charge of Earth-Current the weapon was using had come.

  Something else from Ydmos stirred in my memory as well. His people knew the art of resisting mental domination. It had not worked perfectly, and the enemy could find ways around it, as it had with him, for the enemy had found a way to drive him mad, and have him kill his own loved ones.

  But, he still knew enough to know how false memories could be implanted.

  I remembered the Irish Elk. I remembered what the great and magnificent beasts had looked like, rushing along the grassy plains which, at that time, stretched across all Europe, including the peninsula that one day, half-submerged, would be the British Isles.

  How had I not seen it before? He-Sings-Death was a caveman, from some fourteen thousand years before Christ. Enoch was a Biblical antediluvian. The ages of the Biblical patriarchs, when added up, did not reach back farther than 4000 or 5000 years at most: less than half the time. Kitimil was a Neanderthal Man. His race dated from two hundred thousand years before Christ. The Neanderthal came from a world that the Nephilim, the sons of Caine, could not come from.

  These outer beings were not fallen angels. They were not the devils from the mother’s Bible lore, any more than they were the Dry Folk of The Smotherer that He-Sings-Death took them to be.

  It was a lie. The memories in my head of Enoch, son of Caine were an invention. I had never made a bargain with the Dark Powers. I had never bowed down to them.

  My soul was not entangled with them. I rotated the thousand-sided figure in my mind, and, at once, the false memories of Enoch were gone. Whatever happened now, they could not follow me through my own soul. The worm had wiggled off the hook.

  Even with half a dozen of the squealing, stinking, pig-things on me, I reached out my hand. Ydmos did not know how the Diskos was magnetically attuned to the soul of the user. The science, by his time, had been forgotten. But Abraxander-the-Threshold knew it. A slight push in my imagination on the thousand-sided figure, and the mighty weapon popped into and out of the fourth dimension and it was in my hand again.

  Ydmos did not know how the spiritual energies in the weapon were programmed. He did not even know what the weapon was made of. But the Blue Man knew. I knew. The slightest touch on the thousand-sided figure brought the blue assemblers into my bloodstream, my skin, my nervous system. I had no need for the two systems to “handshake”, since the Diskos was already attuned to me. As quickly as that, and I had a mental link with the spirit in the weapon; and I knew the programming codes.

  The safety interlock disengaged. Ydmos had not even known there was a safety interlock. I programmed the weapon to do what it was that the arrows of Mneseus had done, but with tremendously more force than a spark rubbed from Amber could summon. Then, mentally, I ordered the power core to overload.

  White fire shined from the weapon, and flashes of terrible lightning shot in each direction. My armor grounded me, but not the swine-things touching me. The electricity flowed to them and to their comrades touching them. The whole huddle of the creatures was paralyzed as their limbs jerked with torture-spasms. I stood, and threw the whole lot of them from me. The one or two not already dead, I decapitated with a backhand stroke of the mighty weapon. Sparks and black smoke poured from the piled corpses around me.

  He-Sings-Death had not known why the after-life creatures, the monster he had thought was the King of the Dead had allowed him to see the ghost of his wife in a dream, but Ydmos understood the aetheric energies involved in connecting the living and the dead. Mneseus understood necromancy. He-Sings-Death thought that the horror he had met, had begged, and had sung his sad songs to, had been moved by his plea to allow his wife to live again. All a deception. All a lie. The death-being had been using that sorrow, that plea, and those tears to make a connection similar to the connections I was using to call weapons into my hands from across the barrier of time and space. He-Sings-Death had been allowed to go down into the underworld and return, not to bring his wife to life again, but to let the horrors who fed off the souls of the dead follow him back up to the light again. That was why he had been told not to turn his head; so that he would not see what was following him. Poor fool.

  He had opened the door for them. But who could close it again, once opened?

  The swine-things were slain or thrown back, but, at that same moment, like a mist rising from the ground, I saw dozens of pale and terrible spirits, hooded and shrouded in gray, and silent as death itself, standing before me. I heard the door hinges creak behind me, and the door swung open.

  I backed up, and took my position in the threshold. She was behind me, as I knew she would be. Kitimil, I did not see him; I hope he scuttled inside during the confusion. Even him, I would not leave out there, in the airless red plain of silence, with them.

  The silent, robed figures raised their left hands, all in unison. The open doors turned into green jade, and the stones of the porch and threshold melded or bonded with them in a strange fashion I did not comprehend.

  The door now could not be shut.

  All the silent, huge and misshapen outer gods rose to their feet, sending the mountains tumbling.

  150. The Master Of The Master-Word

  One of the hooded figures glanced at me, and my heart burned with cold in my chest, so painfully that I would have dropped my weapon, if my weapon were not, of its own accord, holding itself in my hand. I would have knelt and fainted, had not the soft hands behind me, woman’s hands, held onto my gray cloak. I leaned heavily on the shaft of my weapon, and she prevented me from falling.

  I said, “Why didn’t you leave me out here?”

  From behind me, I felt her warm breath tickling my ear. “Don’t be silly. Say the word.”

  She was using the language of Ydmos’ time. It was the Inner Speech, the tongue he had never thought to hear again.

  And the declension used in that strange language was not the mode used when a grave danger threatened. It was the mode used only during decontamination procedures. Her voice was rich with unspoken laughter. At the very moment of the utter and absolute victory of darkness, she was amused at them, as if they were harmless: a mere afterthought, a fading nightmare, which the new universe would soon forget.

  The word she meant, of course, was the Master-Word.

  I said, “What? The Master-Word won’t drive them away. It has no power over them. It is merely something they cannot say.”

  She said, “A dog hair cannot bite someone, but you called Pepper from outside of time. You called Africa to you, and me. Why not more? There is One who is out there, who can do more than Pepper can.”

  “What One? Who?”

  “The One who promises that all lovers will be reunited after the end.”

  I said the Master-Word. She was right. I could sense or see links, like the same chain that bound my soul to hers, running from the Master-Word to some ulterior power beyond all space and time.

  With the slightest rotation of the thousand-sided solid, I brought the being, whatever it was, that had first spoken that word into being, and invited Him to enter this scene, this universe, and my life.

  The light was too bright to look at, but, once I got used to it, I saw her, and I turned, and I embraced her, despite the hardness of my armor. The door closed behind me.

  It was so bright.

  Books by John C. Wright

  CASTALIA HOUSE

  Awake in the Night Land

  City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

  One Bright Star to Guide Them

  Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  The Golden Age

  The Phoenix Exultant

  The Golden Transcendence

  WAR OF THE DREAMING

  Last Guardian of Everness

  Mists of Everness

  CHRONICLES OF CHAOS

  Orphans of Chaos

  Fug
itives of Chaos

  Titans of Chaos

  COUNT TO THE ESCHATON

  Count to a Trillion

  The Hermetic Millennia

  Judge of Ages

  OTHER NOVELS

  Null-A Continuum

  FANTASY

  Awake in the Night by John C. Wright

  Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

  One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

  A Magic Broken by Vox Day

  A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

  The Wardog's Coin by Vox Day

  The Last Witchking by Vox Day

  Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Vox Day

  The Altar of Hate by Vox Day

  The War in Heaven by Theodore Beale

  The World in Shadow by Theodore Beale

  The Wrath of Angels by Theodore Beale

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman

  The Stars Came Back by Rolf Nelson

  City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright

  On a Starry Night by Tedd Roberts

  QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

  QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

  QUANTUM MORTIS The Programmed Mind by Vox Day

  CASTALIA CLASSICS

  The Programmed Man by Jean and Jeff Sutton

  Apollo at Go by Jeff Sutton

  First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton

  NON-FICTION

  Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

  Astronomy and Astrophysics by Dr. Sarah Salviander

  TRANSLATIONS

  Särjetty taika

  Uma Magia Perdida

  Mantra yang Rusak

  La Moneta dal Mercenario

  I Ragazzoni non Piangono

  QUANTUM MORTIS Тежина Смрти

  QUANTUM MORTIS L’Esprit Programmé

  QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand