Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)

by Wright, John C.

  Galen consulted an almanac, said another set of invocations, and turned the handles of the clockwork to shift the planets into proper positions. Then, with a measuring rod, he paced off the longitude and latitude to where the colored rays formed one or two white dots.

  Galen frowned down at the notebook where he had written his results, puzzled. Raven, who thought he had guessed how this magic worked, pointed up at the silver mirror representing Venus, and said, “Venus out of orbit right now, eh?”

  Galen smiled in surprise.

  They went out on the balcony, measured the height of Venus with an astrolabe, and then Galen carefully raised the mirror to a new calculated position on the dome with a pole.

  Galen pointed at the silvery spot trembling in the mountains of Peru. “I think that smaller light there is Azrael. And see this spot up here on the coast of Maine? That’s us.”

  “And this large one, eh?”

  “The stronghold of the enemy. Acheron.”

  Raven squatted down and looked at where the very bright white fleck of light now hovered on the floor. “Marianas Trench,” he said. “Middle of Pacific. Deepest sea trench in world.”

  Neither of them had noticed Pendrake at the door until he spoke. “Get the coordinates. The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is in those waters; now we know why Azrael’s people ordered it there. They would have used a carrier group out of San Diego, had they not lost control of the Pacific Fleet to mutiny. The mid-Pacific! Good fortune for us; if Acheron had chosen to surface in the Aral Sea, or nearer to the Asiatic coast, our actions would start the first atomic world war.”

  Raven turned, and his eyes grew wide when he saw the sword Pendrake carried, hand on hilt, naked blade against his shoulder. All the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work with subtlest jewelry. The blade itself was polished to a mirror shine, so that a man would see his own face in it, were the blade close enough to strike him; and the letters etched into the blade spelled out: TAKE ME UP.

  Pendrake said, “What about Prometheus?”

  Raven pointed glumly to the carven map of western Russia underfoot. No glints of light were there. “We see nothing,” said Raven.

  Galen said, “The gate to the dream-world must still be shut, there.”

  Raven said, “Where is Wendy, eh?”

  Pendrake said, “Lemuel wanted to talk to her alone. He came back from the dream-world with the Chalice, but it was covered by a white cloth, and he doesn’t want to show it to anyone. I asked him what happened when he got the cup, but he seemed really shaken up, and wouldn’t talk about it. ‘Shaken up’ isn’t quite the right word. Amazed; reverent. He only made a comment that time in the dream-world is not the way it is here, and that years can pass in a moment of dreaming.”

  “And you? What did you see?” asked Galen.

  Pendrake said, “I was standing at twilight on a marshy moor, with no path nor track to be seen, and up in front of me, there rose a topless pyramid of thirteen blocks. And the twilight was not coming from the sun, for there was no sun in that land, but from the eye of God, which hung above the pyramid …”

  At that moment, there came a sound of drums crashing and trumpets braying, high up from outside, from the Eastern sky. The noise resolved itself into a tritonal chord, and the source of the eerie music passed from west to east in the heavens, diminished in the distance, and was gone.

  Raven was clutching his ears, looking upward at the dome’s ceiling, eyes staring and mouth a-gape. Galen started to draw his bow and then lowered it with shaking hands. The arrow fell from his string and lay gleaming on the marble.

  Pendrake frowned thoughtfully. “Mr. Waylock? Galen … ?”

  Galen whispered, “They were the seven Amshaspands of Acheron; Taurvi, Zairicha, Khurdad, Murdad, and two others. They are released from the tower called ‘Injustice’ to herald the coming of the empire of darkness; the drums they beat are made from the hides of apostate martyrs. It means that the tops of three of the towers, those of the central keep, must be above water at this point, though the gates should still be under. We have a lot less time than Grandpa thought.”

  Pendrake said, “Let’s move it.”

  Raven said, “How are we finding Prometheus?”

  Pendrake said, “Your father is still alive?”

  Raven blinked. “Sure. Lives in New York City. He …”

  “Call him. He knows where the Titan is.”

  Galen said, “No phones in this old place. And my cabin out there is trashed.”

  Pendrake, without speaking, took a matte black cellular phone out from a cloak pocket, unfolded it with a flick of his wrist, tossed it to Raven.

  Raven wondered why a strange sense of nervousness began to crawl over him as he started to dial.

  III

  Wendy followed Lemuel into a small room paneled in carven woodcuts. He carried no lantern; the pulse of rosy light breathing out from underneath the large, white veil that draped the chalice cast a fog of light about his feet as he walked, and shadows played along the ceiling.

  Wendy watched as Lemuel carefully slid shut the panel behind him. She said, “Okay! I’m ready. What do I have to do?”

  Lemuel bent his stiff knees with a grunt, and motioned for Wendy to kneel. Wendy whispered, “Is this going to be religious?”

  Lemuel smiled sadly. “It might be easier if it were. I was hoping we would not fall so far if we fainted. But perhaps that is why people knelt when they saw holy things to begin with.”

  He put the Chalice carefully down on the floor between them, and the veil stirred and its edges rippled weightlessly, as if the pressure of the light were living in it.

  “Now, Wendy, you are a very nice girl, and this should be no problem for you … not … not like I had … don’t be nervous …”

  Wendy could not think of anything he could have said that would have made her more nervous. A tremble went up her spine.

  Lemuel closed his eyes for a long moment, as if he were praying. Then he opened them slowly and looked deeply into Wendy’s eyes, and he said, “Wendy, please keep in mind that everything we do and say in this life, and even everything we think, is being watched and judged. Judged to see if we will abide by that law which is written into every man’s heart from the day he is born. This law has two parts. Men have thoughts and reason, to tell them about the world we know, and any rational man knows he must treat others as he himself wishes to be treated. That is the Golden Rule and it is the law of this world.”

  He continued, “Men also have feelings and intuitions to tell them that, even if this world we know does not enforce this law, some other world, some next world, a world we don’t know, ought to enforce it. We don’t know what happens after death. Where we don’t know, we can only hope, or despair. We either hope, without evidence, that there is a life after death; or we fear, equally without evidence, that there is not.”

  Then he said, “Remember what you say is being judged. And tell me whether you have hope in life after death.”

  Wendy laughed.

  She said, “Well, of course! Don’t be silly!”

  Lemuel licked his lips. He said, “Yes …? And why?”

  Wendy rolled her eyes, as if he had asked her the most obvious thing in the world. “If there is nothing after this life, then nobody’s story, not a single person’s, would have a happy ending, right? And every story with a happy ending would just be a lie. And then there wouldn’t be any point in going on with the story, would there? There wouldn’t be any point in anything.”

  Now she smiled like sunshine: “But we all know what happy endings are. We’ve always known, everybody. Happiness is real. It’s the only thing that really is, isn’t it?”

  Lemuel looked slightly puzzled, and perhaps fearful, as if this were not the answer he’d expected; but his fear turned unexpectedly to joy when he saw the veil stirring and lifting.

  Silently, with no hand to touch it, the white cloth floated up, dancing, away
from the Chalice, made buoyant by the streams and pulses of light that now inundated the room.

  Lemuel’s eyes began to water from the brightness of it; but he dared not look away. Wendy, her face transfixed with joy beyond all smiling, looked down at the Chalice.

  It was a simple cup with a broad bowl, deep and generous, standing on a square stem, and it was made all of smooth ivory, so that the light that beat through the sides and smoky stem dyed all things rosy red. But the light itself within was diamond and prismatic, for it was a pool of pearls and flock of burning butterflies.

  Wendy had seen such a light before; in Galen’s hand or being pushed by Raven’s breathe back into Galen’s body. It was the light of living souls, a multitude of abundant lights. She wondered what great spirit, or what man, had put so much, a living force equal to so many lives, into this cup of hope, that others might one day drink of it.

  Where that light fell, the wooden carving on the wall immediately burst into the buds and flowers of each type of tree from which those planks had come. Her cotton skirt put forth bolls and cotton flowers. She giggled when she saw her patent leather shoes grow hair.

  Then, her face all solemn, and her eyes all shining with delight, without waiting to be asked, Wendy put down her head and drank her fill.

  Strangely, the more she drank, the more the cup seemed to hold, until it overflowed the brim.

  When she and Lemuel left the little closet, there was a sapling growing up in the spot where the cup had spilled, and the little closet was filled with leaves and springtime air.

  Because Wendy went skipping and floating up ahead of him, laughing for joy and kicking away her shoes, Lemuel was left behind; and he was alone when he heard the monstrous drum beats thunder from the east, and the shriek of strange trumpets pass by overhead, traveling west.

  His face was pale with fear, which the rosy light from the Chalice could not blush red again. Lemuel tucked the cup, swathed in its long white veil, beneath his arm as he ran upstairs.

  IV

  Var sat nodding in his threadbare but comfortable armchair in his small apartment, petting the cat that purred in his lap. He knew he had trouble staying awake nowadays, but, on this day of all days, he had set the two alarm clocks that stood clicking on the mantlepiece, ticking loudly in the quiet little room.

  He had not shaved or cut his hair in many, many days, and now his hair lay like a blanket of snow across his shoulders, and the cat was batting at the long curls of the white beard.

  The chair faced the window, outside of which there was a little park, the only spot of greenery to be found in acres of surrounding concrete, glass, and steel. Sometimes children played there. Var found it more interesting than television, which stood neglected in the corner where he had pushed it the last time it had broken.

  The stove had also broken long ago. Atop the stove stood the electric hotplate and saucepan upon which he warmed the cans of soup he ate for his meals. At times, he got the impulse to walk down to the corner shop to drink a cup of coffee or eat a plate of scrambled eggs made by his friend Hezikiah; sometimes he was actually in his burly coat and pacing slowly down the sidewalk before he recalled that the corner shop had closed four years ago, and that Hezikiah had died five years ago.

  Above the window was thumbtacked his calendar, which, page after page, he had waited through, crossing off the days until this one, the day circled in gold and overwritten and surrounded with small pictures and cartoons. Those pictures, during long, boring months and weeks, he had drawn to remind him of everything he had been told about this day.

  Here were tiny drawings of black towers rising from the sea, drawn in the margins above the name of the month: there were pictures of flying goats drawing a chariot; a great ship; a heroic figure crucified upon a cliff, the chains that bound him parting; here was a girl with a key, floating in the air; and there was a wizard with the key now in his hands; and the sun going dark at noon.

  When he was in the hospital this most recent time, and he saw the other old people dying around him, he knew the cause. They had nothing for which to live. They did not have the pictures. They did not have the awaited day, the day circled in gold.

  Var, however, refused to die that time, and his stubbornness pulled him back.

  Below the window was the radiator, upon which he had placed a board, draped in a red cloth; here was a picture, drawn in charcoal, now framed under glass, of his long-dead wife. Every day he replaced the flowers in the vases to either side. Almost every day. Sometimes he forgot.

  He had been napping when the Sun went dark at noon; one moment, he was nodding in the sunlight; and the next, he jerked his head upright, seeing it was night. He knew, somewhere above the stinks and smokes of this city, the constellations would be all wrong; Autumn Stars shining in the spring.

  Var sat with one hand on the telephone, counting down the seconds on his pocket watch. He remembered, about twenty years ago, losing the long speech he had written down in preparation for this day, and how frantically he had, over the next year or two, tried to remember and recreate the wording of that speech. Now he had only the notes he had jotted down four years ago, when he noticed the light of his memory beginning to dim.

  He picked up the phone a second before it rang.

  “My Son,” he said in his native language. “I was told you would call. This I was told when you were less than one year old, when I stood in the mountains, surrounded by snow, surrounded by enemies. Your real father was chained up on the mountainside before me. His love had killed your mother.

  “Wait. I am explaining. You listen. She knew a baby born of such a father might be too big for her hips to bear. But she had seen him three times climbing the frozen mountains by herself. Very courageous woman, your mother. Afraid of nothing. I remember how the midwife, her hands all bloody, was all tears. Not your mother. Her eyes were clear, even while she was dying. And she said you must live, even if she were to die, because you would save the world and your children would heal it.

  “Listen, Prometheus is chained on the cliffs 1,028 meters northeast-east from the highest point of Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus. But you will find it more swiftly if you take the road to it, which I took from it when I flew away. My daughter-in-law has a silver key, does she not? Prometheus said it would be in her hand. There is a doctor with a bow and arrows with you, is there not? A man who can heal all wounds? Yes. Listen; these are the instructions. I have waited thirty years to say them, so you must listen.

  “The doctor must make your wife sleep; he must make her dream that she is standing beneath a high mountain. In the sky above is a raven fighting with a vulture. She must unlock the sky with her key, and the road will come down to her from the door which opens in the sky. There will be a creature guarding the beginning of that road. To that guard, she must say, Piotr Ivanovitch Vanko has lived without his name for thirty years; you must take me to the place where he had hidden it; and she must say these magic names; listen carefully; she must say, ‘I order you in the names of the saviors of mankind: by Prometheus, savior of fire; by Ducaleon, savior of flood, his son; by the blind poet Homer, who taught men to sing; by the wise fool Socrates, who taught men to question.’

  “The middle of the road is guarded by the mists of forgetfulness; only one of the men from the tower of four moons, the tower of forever, can pass through. The terminus of the road is guarded by the king of vultures. Only a dream can banish a nightmare.

  “Are you writing this down, Raven? Write it down.

  “You are wondering the name you were born under, no? What do you mean, you don’t want to hear this thing? I tell you even so. You are called Vasil Piotrovitch Vanko, and you will be the father of a race of kings.

  “There is no more time. Listen and do not speak! There is a warrior with you, a man with a cart pulled by flying goats? When your wife goes to free Prometheus, you must not wait, but go at once to the great ship which is in the ocean where the black towers rise. There, you must unleash the
power of the sun. The Lord of the Black Tower must come himself to face you; and when that happens, you must be ready to blow the horn … What? What is that terrible noise? Raven? My Son?”

  Var blinked sadly at the phone. Then he slowly replaced it in the cradle. He petted his cat, saying, “And I have been waiting all these years to tell you, that, even if another man is your father, you have always been my own true son, and I have always been very proud of you. That what you did on that lifeboat you had to do, and I never blamed you for that. I never blamed your mother for what she had to do. And you may miss me when I am gone, but I am very tired now, and would like to rest.”

  A few years ago, he had saved up enough money to move to a place outside of the city, away from the seacoast. But when the time came to move, it did not seem worth the effort, and the savings money had been lost in trickles of little expenses.

  At the bottom margin of the calendar, in one corner, was a drawing of the great sea-wave crashing over the Empire State Building. Slightly above it, was a doodle of a man stepping onto a long road leading up to the clouds, with a winged angel pointing the way.

  Funny. He had never drawn what was at the end of the road. As soon as the cat moved off his lap, Var decided, he would go get his pencil, and draw in a little picture of his wife.

  V

  Raven was falling, flung from his feet as the marble world cracked underfoot, and the dome of the sky overhead was hurled up and away into space. Wheels and broken gears, torn from the receding dome, showered through the air, and streamers of brick and rock and dust. Raven, on his back, saw the dome turning end over end high above before it disintegrated into shards of masonry.

  His fear made lighting and thunder race through heaven. In a lightning flash he saw the enormous black hands of Death, which had ripped away the dome, descending, and the five bloodstained nails gleamed like five icebergs; and the palm, as it came, was like a storm cloud, blotting out the stars as it grew larger, closer. The little telephone spun away out of his grip before his father had finished speaking; it dropped from his hand and was lost in the darkness.