Silence ruled the mountaintop once more. No word came, nor shout of wind. I moved toward the marker, hand still on my sword. As I did, the light changed, revealing the massive glyph carved at the top: a single circle bisected by a vertical line. The same symbol I had seen in the hidden chamber of Calagah. Remembering that encounter, I approached with caution and stretched out one gauntleted hand to touch my reflection in the mirror-dark stone.
Nothing happened.
Memory of pain and deep cold moved in me, kindling an idea. I fumbled with my glove’s seal and cast the first gauntlet aside. “Take off your mask,” I muttered, peeling the second from my other hand. I reached out with my bare hands and touched the surface of the monolith.
Again, nothing happened.
Scowling, I stepped back and turned away. I was so sure I’d been right. Resisting an urge to kick one of the gauntlets aside, I strode to the far edge of the mountains. “I don’t know what you want from me.” I turned back to glare at the monolith . . . and froze.
My reflection had not stirred. It remained standing square in the face of the black stone, one hand flat against the surface just where I had left it.
I did draw my sword then, but left the blade unkindled.
Green eyes met violet.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, drawing nearer with careful steps. No second reflection appeared behind the green-eyed one. “Why did you bring me back?”
The other Hadrian raised his chin in a gesture I knew all too well. His lips did not move as he answered me.
You are the shortest way.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Silence.
My reflection watched with flat, green eyes, its hand pressed flat against the surface of the stone.
I understood, and held my hand to its.
Pelagic cold poured through the contact, so deep my bones ached. I gasped, sagged against the wall and slid to my knees once more. But my hand would not be moved. I felt as though stone fingers had closed on mine. Referred pain lanced up my arm and kindled in my brain, setting alight that spot behind my left eye and whiting out my vision.
And all at once I was not on the mountain at all.
I was looking down on it instead, soaring as a bird might above the stone giants and crumbling terraces of the city. My vision began to shimmer, to flicker like the shapes in a child’s shadow theater as it spun about the lamp. I beheld other mountaintops, retreating in undulating procession east and west into eternity. I saw myself kneeling at the monolith, or standing, or not there at all. The further away I looked, the more different the mountaintops became, until the monolith was gone and the stone faces and the mountain with it. I saw our Sparrowhawks circling in a distant sky, and the white shapes of our camp pitched on red sands at the edges of infinity.
The pain flared white with the flash of revelation, for I understood.
The breadth of time unrolled beneath me. All the places that might have been or might be breaking like waves against the ever-moving present. I saw possibilities rise to crash upon the now and fall away as time slipped ever on. Infinite possibilities—but only one was real. Only one occurred; the rest fell into darkness in corners of time that never happened. I knelt in such a corner that very moment, upon that strange mountaintop towering above an Annica that would never be, lost to unrealized potential, to entropy. Suddenly I understood what the voice had meant when it spoke of our being behind the stage.
The stone giants, the city, the mountain on which I stood existed in another present. One that had not happened—that could not happen—because the past that informed its reality had not. I had come to a time unreal and unrealized.
Beneath the gaze of my vision naked time rolled like a carpet, like a thin sheet of oil atop an ocean of what might be. Time’s wave broke, and infinite nows shattered and sank into darkness save that one which we would say occurred. The waters of potential receded, running down toward the future—if future it could be called—only to be thrown back upon the present in new form.
I looked back—upward, or so it seemed to me—and watched our galaxy play out in innumerable forms. Focusing, I found I could pick out the threads, the rivers of time tangled in that ocean. I saw our Empire—and nations like our Empire, and others totally strange—spread across its face. I saw a mighty dominion of the machines set their hellish order over the stars in a time that never was, and saw strange flags planted on worlds I might have known by other names. I saw the green hills of Earth and witnessed the white pyramids of the Mericanii fall and rise above the cities of our birth. I saw Felsenburgh’s peace and the war he’d built it upon. I saw the Earth burning and the white chariot of Apollo that first carried us to the stars. All the empires of man’s birth flickered and died small deaths. Rome and Egypt, China and Britain all passed in instants until the Earth quaked beneath the dominion of dragons in the deeps of time.
And I saw myself. My own life ran like a silver thread from Delos to Emesh, from Emesh to the Demiurge, from the Demiurge to the very mountain on which I stood. Broken, Jari had said, and broken again. At last I understood his meaning, seeing clean fractures where my thread passed from Delos and the Quiet had intervened to force me onto Emesh and where Aranata had taken my head. Jari had spoken of roads, but I saw rivers. Perhaps the truth of what I saw is more than any human mind can comprehend, and these visions are only the animal mind’s interpretation of the eldritch truth. Perhaps we humans can perceive that truth only by analogy. Even Jari’s posthuman mind had failed.
So I looked forward to see what had driven Jari mad when he saw me.
The Cielcin roared and raged across the galaxy. Planets burned and fell. Billions of lives ended. Blood flowed like water and soaked the stars. I felt the heat and saw the sun-flash of nuclear fire as ships and cities died. I saw men and women corralled and chivvied into shuttles to be taken back to victorious Cielcin warships. I saw the white cities of Forum plunge burning from the sky. All that art and history, all the glory of our age and Empire fell in ashes like snow. Red-haired princes hung on hooks like sides of meat, and I recognized faces I knew. Crude Philip and Ricard. Proud Aurelian. There too were Titania and Vivienne and the Empress who hated me.
And there were Selene and Alexander. Each mounted on hooks beneath their ribs, paraded on tall staffs like banners.
I saw the oceans of Delos boiled away and lightning strike the towers of Devil’s Rest. A girl with black hair and violet eyes stood upon the highest walks of the Great Keep and watched the black ships descending, unfurling their banners across the sky as cannons rained fire.
The sister I’d never met, perhaps.
I never learned. For some force drew my eye, pulled it forward—downward—along the trough of time’s wave, chasing that bright and silver line toward the manifold unfurling futures. Another world. Another star. I knew the black ship well by then. I had died there, after all. Like a ghost I floated amongst its legion of statues, their metal forms pockmarked and scarred. I passed through its hull and down its aimless corridors, through the garden where I’d lost my life and up an empty shaft along one castellated tower to a place I had not been before. The Demiurge’s bridge was a dark place. Red holographs gleamed above console banks, and the holograph plates in the foreground showed the system unrolled beneath us: two fleets converging above a green world, its yellow sun shining out clear across the void. I did not then recognize the sun, nor the planet in its orbit. Never had I seen two fleets of such size. Such mass and charge. They swarmed across the tactical holograph displays like a constellation of fireflies, filling the skies above the planet. How many of our legions were there arrayed? I could not count them.
I know the number now. They recited it to me at my trial.
One hundred twenty-seven legions.
Three million, one hundred seventy-five thousand men. And that was without counting the various logothetes,
the courtiers and nobiles who had sailed with our Radiant Emperor to witness his last and final victory over the barbarian xenobites.
That was without counting the more than two billion people on the planet below.
Without counting the Cielcin.
I felt the deck plates cold beneath my feet for the barest instant, and heard a strange, familiar voice. “Are we ready?” A figure stirred in the captain’s chair and leaned into the light. Hadrian Marlowe stood, black cloak settling about his frame. It may seem strange to say, but I had not known myself at first glance. Something about me had changed. Something in the shape of the face, perhaps? In the slant of brow and slope of nose? In the way the pointed jaw set as I moved toward the window.
“Aye sir,” said a voice I did not know. I could not see its owner. “But . . . are you certain?”
My other self stopped midway between the chair and the forward holograph display. He turned, locking eyes perhaps with the lieutenant who had questioned him. He almost faced me, and I saw him plain. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, and there was something in his face wholly unfamiliar to me.
These thoughts were driven from my mind a moment after, for that other Hadrian’s eyes met mine. Coincidence? One corner of his mouth twisted up in that familiar half-smile. “Do what must be done,” he said—I said—and turned his back on me. “Fire at will.”
The vision broadened, blurred, and skipped ahead. I saw the sun split open like a bloated whale and spew its fire forth. Fleets burned and the planet with it . . . and all those lives.
“No!” I screamed. “No!”
The pain flared once more behind my eyes, and all went white as that murdered sun. Pain lanced also down my arm, but I pulled it away, severing contact with the black stone. I fell back upon the rough stone and clutched my frozen hand to my chest. I half-expected to see my own bloody fingertips still glued to the face of the monument, but the flesh was whole and wholly without blemish.
“I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t!”
The unheard voice descended on me once again. This must be.
“Why?” I lay back against the ground, and when I spoke it was in a smaller, weaker voice than before. “In Earth’s name, why?”
We must be.
“You?” I scrabbled back, moving farther away from the monument and the dark vision it had offered me. Both Brethren and Horizon had said the Quiet lived in the future—in a possible future—that they interfered to direct the flow of history unto themselves. “The Cielcin have to die so you might live . . .” I massaged my still-aching hand, flexed the fingers. There was no trauma on the flesh. Only the memory of pain. Only the agony. I was shaking my head. “I won’t do it. I won’t. I won’t be your tool.” I tried to stand, but my body remembered its exhaustion, its hunger, and I could not stand. “I will not butcher them.”
You have before.
The memory of Nobuta’s death washed over me, and I felt the creature’s body go limp. Uvanari died again beneath my knife. And Iubalu, and the demon on Arae, followed by the nuclear flash as Ulurani’s ship exploded in the skies above Aptucca, a little nova to herald the coming death of Gododdin’s sun.
I shook my head more furiously, and drove back the visions.
“Those were different,” I said. “Those were all different.”
The words played again in my ears, my own voice—my own face—alien to me. Fire at will. Do what must be done.
What must be.
This must be. The Quiet insisted.
“Why?” I almost shouted, managing this time to lurch all the way to my knees. “Tell me!”
Listen, came the entity’s response, a single word no louder than the rustle of wind through autumn leaves. It faded from my hearing and was gone.
* * *
I could not leave the mountain, though I tried. Finding my feet I staggered to the edge of the escarpment. The slope descended so steeply and treacherously that in my exhausted state I knew to attempt the descent was to kill me. I’d staggered back and recovered my gloves, still meaning to try. My helmet seals hissed back into place, and the antiseptic blankness of suit oxygen replaced the gunpowder and iron smell of the Annican air.
I made it perhaps ten feet before I fell. One foot went out from under me, and I slipped off the narrow shelf and fell perhaps thirty yards, coat shredding itself along the near-vertical rock face. Only the suit’s gel layer saved me, flash-hardening with the impacts to insulate my joints. Landing on an outcrop below, I struck my head and knew no more.
* * *
Bleary eyes opened on the Annican sky, still that burned cream color and not the black of night. The same day? Or another day? I drank from my suit’s recycler tube, stomach cramping for want of bread. I coughed, spitting water along the inside of the suit mask—a bad situation, that. Still coughing and without thinking about it, I undid my mask’s seals. No alarm sounded this time. And I wiped my face on the torn sleeve of the coat I wore over the environment suit.
It was a long time before I sat up, and longer still before I realized where I was.
The monument loomed like a black finger over me, slightly tilted where it stood on the edge of the mountain peak. I was back on the summit. I had no memory of climbing, but in my state that was no guarantee. I fell back in the dirt.
“On your feet, Your Radiance,” came an old, rough voice. “This all you got?”
I shut my eyes. I did not want to see Ghen again.
“I forgive you, you know,” said another voice. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”
I did not want to see Switch either.
“Fall asleep there, and the birds’ll get you, Had.”
I did open my eyes then, knowing full well what I’d see.
Cat sat on one low rock, legs crossed beneath her patched, filthy dress. Her thick, matted hair stood all on end, but she smiled through the grime. Ghen stood just behind her, hulking in the maroon fatigues of the Red Company, slit nostril flared. Switch sat nearby. Not the man I’d banished, but the boy I’d sheltered in Colosso, befriended, defended, twice failed. He wore the dinted armor of a fighting pit myrmidon, and sat sharpening his steel gladius.
“There are no birds here,” I said.
“Not yet,” Cat answered me. “But they comin’. Give it time.”
I turned my face away, but when I did I found them in similar positions on my other side, such that I could not escape the sight of them. “You’re not real,” I said. “You’re them.”
“We are,” the three said in unison, confirming what I already knew. They were but faces the Quiet wore, as it had for so long worn Gibson’s shape—when I believed him dead. I knew Cat and Ghen were dead, having seen both their bodies. The Gray Rot had taken Cat on Emesh, and The Painted Man had done for Ghen, a victim of devilry and my own bad commanding. Switch was probably dead, unless like Gibson he too had spent the long decades since Vorgossos frozen, but I thought not. Whatever powers govern our universe—and I was starting to have my suspicions—they would not allow two such unlikely coincidences to happen within one human lifetime. No, Switch was dead, burned or buried on some rock—I know not where.
“What does that mean?” I asked. Resigning myself to the Quiet’s little torment, I sat up and faced the shades of my dead companions.
“We are without beginning,” Switch answered, momentarily setting aside his whetstone.
“Without end,” Ghen added.
Cat took up the chorus, saying, “We create ourselves.”
We are.
“I won’t do it,” I said, pulling one aching leg in beneath myself.
“You will.” Cat smiled at me sweetly.
“You must,” Ghen said.
Still holding his sword against his shoulder, Switch said, “To create is to choose.”
Frustrated, I surged to my feet. “Speak plainly!” I
roared.
But the phantoms were gone, and I stood alone once more upon the mountaintop, wind blowing through my hair.
Listen!
The Quiet’s command rang out like thunder, like the lightning itself.
“I am!” I shouted, and beat my breast with a fist.
But no answer came.
I seated myself on one of the low stones, glaring at the monolith. My reflection did not appear. After several minutes passed, I rose and—tearing the gauntlets once more from my hands—placed my palms flat against the cold monolith.
No visions came, no voice spoke to me.
I howled and sat at the base of the monument like Cid Arthur before the Merlin Tree, my back to the stone. Perhaps I slept, or wandered in that country like sleep which is nearer Death than dreaming. Nothing moved, for there was nothing on all that world save the stone of mountains and graven images. Not even the haunted winds blew.
So absolute a silence I have never known.
We fear silence. I said once that darkness is chaos itself, that in darkness any and all things might arise unseen like the cat from Pandora’s evil box. Silence is like that, but more profound. There was darkness before the dawn of time, and silence, too, but silence was the deeper thing, the canvas against which all thought is measured. You have heard stories of men driven mad in quiet rooms by the rushing of their own blood. It is not true. It is not the sound that does it, it is themselves. In silence, they are confronted with their own natures—and with nature itself—and cannot look it in the face. As darkness brings forth the creatures of the night, so silence brings forth the things within our hearts . . . if we will but listen to it.
Night came. And day again after. I emptied my suit’s water supply again and knew it could not last forever. Hunger gnawed at me and blurred my vision, and I half-expected another shade to appear with offers of food. None did. I had confronted Ghen, and Cat, and Switch, and though they had not recriminated me, the memory of their faces haunted my delirium. I was not the man I could be, should be. I had failed them, and failed the bars I’d set for myself. I had punished Switch for caring, and sent Ghen to his death. I could have saved Cat—maybe—if I’d but torn the ring from its chain on my neck and ordered the Borosevo hospitals to treat her.
Demon in White Page 69