by Robert Reed
As I shuddered with stifled sobs, I decided that I would never tell my parents about this, that I would never have Velag punished for this violence. I didn’t forgive him, not even close, but that is what I decided.
I was seventeen the last time I saw Velag. I went to visit him at the Royal Military Academy’s boarding school. He had been there for four years already. We saw him every few moons when he came back to the City proper to visit. But I wanted to see the campus for myself. It was a lovely train ride, just a few hours from the central districts of the City-of-Long-Shadows to the scattered hamlets beyond it.
It was warmer and brighter out where the Academy was. The campus was beautiful, sown with pruned but still wild looking trees and plants that only grew further out towards Day, their leaves a lighter shade of blue and their flowers huge, craning to the west on thick stems. The sun still peered safely behind the edge of the world, but its gaze was bright enough to wash the stately buildings of the boarding school with a fiery golden-red light, sparkling in the waxy leaves of vines winding their way around the arched windows. On every ornate, varnished door was a garish propaganda poster of the Dark Lord of Nightmares, with his cowled cloak of shadows and black sword, being struck down by our soldiers’ bayoneted guns.
I sat with Velag in a cupola in the visitors’ garden, which was on a gentle bluff. In the fields adjacent, his fellow student-soldiers played tackleball, their rowdy calls and whistles ringing through the air. We could see heavy banks of glowing, sunlit storm-clouds to the west where the atmosphere boiled and churned in the heat of Day, beyond miles of shimmering swamp-forests and lakes. To the east, a faint moon hung over the campus, but no stars were visible so close to Day.
Velag looked so different from the last time I saw him. His pimples were vanishing, the sallow softness of adolescence melting away to reveal the man he was to become. The military uniform, so forbidding in red and black, suited his tall form. He looked smart and handsome in it. It hurt me to see him shackled in it, but I could see that he wore it with great pride.
He held my hand and asked about my life back home, about my plans to apply to the College of Archaeology at the University of St. Kataretz. He asked about our parents. He told me how gorgeous and grown-up I looked in my dress, and said he was proud of me for becoming a “prodigy.” I talked to him with a heavy ache in my chest, because I knew with such certainty that we hardly knew each other, and would get no chance to any time soon, as he would be dispatched to the frontlines of Penumbral Conquest.
As if reading my thoughts, his cheek twitched with what I thought was guilt, and he looked at the stormy horizon. Perhaps he was remembering the night on which he told me he would grow up and kill Nightmares like Father—a promise he was keeping. He squeezed my hand.
“I’ll be alright, Val. Don’t you worry.”
I gave him a rueful smile. “It’s not too late. You can opt to become a civilian after graduation and come study with me at St. Kataretz. Ma and papa would think no less of you. You could do physics again, you loved it before. We can get an apartment in Pemluth Halls, share the cost. The University’s right in the middle of the City, we’d have so much fun together.”
“I can’t. You know that. I want this for myself. I want to be a soldier, and a knight.”
“Being a knight isn’t the same thing as it was in papa’s time. He was independent, a privateer. Things have changed. You’ll be a part of the military. Knighthoods belong to them now and they’re stingy with them. They mostly give them to soldiers who are wounded or dead, Velag.”
“I’m in military school, by the saints, I know what a knighthood is or isn’t. Please don’t be melodramatic. You’re an intelligent girl.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m going. I have more faith in my abilities than you do.”
“I have plenty of faith in you. But the Nightmares are angry now, Velag. We’re wiping them out. They’re scared and angry. They’re coming out in waves up in the hills. More of our soldiers are dying than ever before. How can I not worry?”
His jaw knotted, he glared down at our intertwined hands. His grip was limp now. “Don’t start with your theories about the benevolence of Nightmares. I don’t want to hear it. They’re not scared, they are fear, and we’ll wipe them off the planet if need be so that you and everybody else can live without that fear.”
“I’m quite happy with my life, thank you. I’d rather you be alive for ma and papa and me than have the terrible horde of the Nightmares gone forever.”
He bit his lip and tightened his hand around mine again. “I know, little sister. You’re sweet to worry so. But the Monarchy needs me. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
And that was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. I knew it was no point pushing him further, because it would upset him. This was his life, after all. The one he had chosen. I had no right to belittle it. I didn’t want to return to the City on bad terms with him. We made what little small talk was left to make, and then we stood and kissed each other on the cheek, and I hugged him tight and watched him walk away.
What good are such promises as the one he made on our final farewell, even if one means them with all of one’s heart? He was dispatched right after his graduation a few moons later, without even a ceremony because it was wartime. After six moons of excited letters from the frontlines at the Penumbral Mountains, he died with a Nightmare’s spear in his chest, during a battle that earned the Monarchy yet another victory against the horde of darkness. Compared to the thousands of Nightmares slaughtered during the battle with our guns and cannons, the Monarchy’s casualties were small. And yet, my parents lost their son, and I my brother.
In death, they did give Velag the knighthood he fought so hard for. Never have I hated myself so much for being right.
When Velag was being helped out of Mother by doctors in the city, my father had been escorting pioneers in the foothills. I see him in his armor, the smell of heated steel and cold sweat cloying under his helm, almost blind because of the visor, sword in one hand, knotted reins and a flaming torch in the other, his mount about to bolt. A new metal coal-chamber filled with glowing embers strapped to his back to keep the suit warm, making his armor creak and pop as it heated up, keeping him off-balance with its weight and hissing vents but holding the freezing cold back a little. Specks of frozen water flying through the torch-lit air like dust, biting his eyes through the visor. His fingers numb in his gloves, despite the suit. The familiar glitter of inhuman eyes beyond the torchlight, nothing to go by but reflections of fire on his foes, who are invisible in the shadows, slinking alongside the caravan like bulges in the darkness. The only thing between the Nightmares and the pioneers with their mounts and carriages weighed down by machinery and thick coils of wire and cable that will bring the light of civilization to these wilds, is him and his contingent.
How long must that journey have been to him? How long till he returned alive to see his wife and new son Velag in a warm hospital room, under the glow of a brand new electric light?
By the time I was born, armorers had invented portable guns and integrated hollow cables in the suit lining to carry ember-heated water around armor, keeping it warmer and enabling mercenaries and knights-errant to go deeper into Evening. The pioneers followed, bringing their technology to the very tops of the foothills, infested with Nightmares. That was when Father stopped going, lest he never return. They had new tools, but the war had intensified. He had a son and daughter to think of, and a wife who wanted him home.
When I watched Velag’s funeral pyre blaze against the light of the west on Barrow-of-Bones cremation hill, I wondered if the sparks sent up into the sky by his burning body would turn to stardust in the ether and migrate to the sun to extend its life, or whether this was his final and utter dissolution. The chanting priest from the Solar Church seemed to have no doubts on the matter. Standing there, surrounded by the fossilized stone ribs of Zhurgeith, last of the sunwyrm
s and heraldic angel of the Monarchy and Church (who also call it Dragon), I found myself truly unsure about what death brings for maybe the first time in my life, though I’d long practiced the cynicism that was becoming customary of my generation.
I thought with some trepidation about the possibility that if the Church was right, the dust of Velag’s life might be consigned to the eternal dark of cosmic limbo instead of finding a place in the sun, because of what he’d done to me as a child. Because I’d never forgiven him, even though I told myself I had.
How our world changes.
The sun is a great sphere of burning gas, ash eventually falls down, and my dead brother remains in the universe because my family and I remember him, just as I remember my childhood, my life, the Nightmares we lived in fear of, the angel Dragon whose host was wiped out by a solar flare before we could ever witness it.
Outside, the wind howls so loud that I can easily imagine it is the sound of trumpets from a frozen city, peopled by the horde of darkness. Even behind the insulated metal doors and heated tunnels of the cave bunkers that make up After-Day border camp, I can see my breath and need two thick coats to keep warm. My fingers are like icicles as I write. I would die very quickly if exposed to the atmosphere outside. And yet, here I am, in the land of Nightmares.
Somewhere beyond these Penumbral Mountains, which we crossed in an airtight train, is the City-of-Long-Shadows. I have never been so far from it. Few people have. We are most indebted to those who mapped the shortest route through the mountains, built the rails through the lowest valleys, blasted new tunnels, laid the foundations for After-Day. But no one has gone beyond this point. We—I and the rest of the expeditionary team from St. Kataretz—will be the first to venture into Night. It will be a dangerous endeavor, but I have faith in us, in the brave men and women who have accompanied me here.
My dear Velag, how would you have reacted to see these beautiful caves I sit in now, to see the secret culture of your enemy? I am surrounded by what can only be called their art, the lantern-light making pale tapestries of the rock walls on which Nightmares through the millennia scratched to life the dawn of their time, the history that followed, and its end, heralded by our arrival into their world.
In this history we are the enemy, bringing the terror of blinding fire into Evening, bringing the advanced weapons that caused their genocide. On these walls we are drawn in pale white dyes, bioluminescent in the dark, a swarm of smeared light advancing on the Nightmares’ striking, jagged-angled representations of themselves, drawn in black dyes mixed from blood and minerals.
In this history Nightmares were alive when the last of the sunwyrms flew into Evening to scourge the land for prey. Whether this is truth or myth we don’t know, but it might mean that Nightmares were around long before us. It might explain their adaptation to the darkness of outer Evening—their light-absorbent skin ancient camouflage to hide from sunwyrms under cover of the forests of Evening. We came into Evening with our fire (which they show sunwyrms breathing) and pale skins, our banners showing Dragon and the sun, and we were like a vengeful race of ghosts come to kill on behalf of those disappeared angels of Day, whom they worshipped to the end—perhaps praying for our retreat.
In halls arched by the ribcages and spines of ancient sunwyrm skeletons I have seen burial chambers; the bones of Nightmares and their children (whom we called imps because we didn’t like to think of our enemy having young) piled high. Our bones lie here too, not so different from theirs. Tooth-marks show that they ate their dead, probably because of the scarcity of food in the fragile ecosystem of Evening. It is no wonder then that they ate our dead too—as we feared. It was not out of evil, but need.
We have so much yet to learn.
Perhaps it would have given you some measure of peace, Velag, to know that the Nightmares didn’t want to destroy us, only to drive us back from their home. Perhaps not.
Ilydrin tells me it is time for us to head out. She is a member of our expedition—a biologist—and my partner. To hide the simple truth of our affection seems here, amidst the empty city of a race we destroyed, an obscenity. Confronted by the vast, killing beauty of our planet’s second half, the stagnant moralities of our city-state appear a trifle. I adore Ilydrin, and I am glad she is here with me.
One team will stay here while ours heads out into Night. Ilydrin and I took a walk outside to test our armored environmental suits to protect us from the lethal cold. We trod down from the caves of After-Day and into the unknown beyond, breath blurring our glass faceplates, our head-lamps cutting broad swathes through the snow-swarmed dark. We saw nothing ahead but an endless plain of ice—perhaps a frozen sea.
No spectral spires, no black banners of Night, no horde of Nightmares waiting to attack, no Dark Lord in his distant obsidian palace (an image Ilydrin and I righteously tore down many times in the form of those Army posters, during our early College vigils). We held each others’ gloved hands and returned to Camp, sweating in our cramped shells, heavy boots crunching on the snow. I thought of you, Father, bravely venturing into bitter Evening to support your family. I thought of you, Brother, nobly marching against the horde for your Monarchy. I thought of you, Mother, courageously carrying your first child alone in that empty house before it became our home. I thought of you, Shadow—broken, tortured prisoner, baring your teeth to your captors in silence.
Out there, I was shaking—nervous, excited, queasy. I wasn’t afraid.
I have Father’s old photograph with the Nightmare’s head (he took it down from above the mantelpiece after Velag died). I have a photograph of Mother, Father, Velag and I all dressed up before our trip to Weep-for-Day. And finally, a smiling portrait of Velag in uniform before he left for the Academy, his many pimples invisible because of the monochrome softness of the image. I keep these photographs with me, in the pockets of my overcoat, and take them out sometimes when I write.
So it begins. I write from the claustrophobic confines of the Night-Crawler, a steam-powered vehicle our friends at the College of Engineering designed (our accompanying professors named it with them, no doubt while drunk in a bar on University-Street). It is our moving camp. We’ll sleep and eat and take shelter in it, and explore further and longer—at least a few vigils, we hope. If its engines fail, we’ll have to hike back in our shells and hope for the best. The portholes are frosted over, but the team is keeping warm by stoking the furnace and singing. Ilydrin comes and tells me, her lips against my hair: “Val. Stop writing and join us.” I tell her I will, in a minute. She smiles and walks back to the rest, her face flushed and soot-damp from the open furnace. I live for these moments.
I will lay down this pen now. A minute.
I don’t know what we’ll find out here. Maybe we will find the Dark Lord and his gathered horde of Nightmares. But at this point, even the military doesn’t believe that, or they would have opposed the funding for this expedition or tried to hijack it.
Ilydrin says there’s unlikely to be life so deep into Night—even Nightmares didn’t venture beyond the mountains, despite our preconceptions. But she admits we’ve been wrong before. Many times. What matters is that we are somewhere new. Somewhere other than the City-of-Long-Shadows and the Penumbral territories, so marked by our history of fear. We need to see the rest of this world, to meet its other inhabitants—if there are others—with curiosity, not apprehension. And I know we will, eventually. This is our first, small step. I wish you were here with me to see it, Velag. You were but a child on this planet.
We might die here. It won’t be because we ventured into evil. It will be because we sought new knowledge. And in that, I have no regrets, even if I’m dead when this is read. A new age is coming. Let this humble account be a preface to it.
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2012
About the Author
Indrapramit Das is a writer from Kolkata, India. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications and anthologies including Clarkeswor
ld, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He is an Octavia Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He completed his M.F.A. at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he wore many hats, including dog hotel night attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, and video game tester. His debut novel The Devourers is forthcoming from Penguin Books India. Follow him on Twitter @IndrapramitDas
Small Markets, Big Wonders
Julie Novakova
How many copies make a bestseller? What does an author need to do in order to have a novel accepted by a publishing house? How does a SF magazine work? We often contemplate these questions but perhaps rarely realize how vastly the answers can differ between national markets.
Last summer, I met Neil Clarke at Worldcon in London and we spoke about speculative fiction (SF, or fantastika) on the Anglo-American and Czech markets, finding sometimes unexpected differences, and the idea to zoom in on the workings of Czech SF sprang up.
But before you read further, beware: This is a zombie story.
From reading market statistics and talking with people in publishing, one can easily come to the notion that current Czech SF market is a high castle built of cards, splendid but fragile and constantly on the verge of collapse. But in spite of all financial crises, VAT changes and an alleged decrease in reading habits, it refuses to collapse, for which most of us are eternally grateful. Is it really as fragile as it looks? How does it differ from the English-speaking market and can either offer any useful insights to the other?