Gather Darkness

by Fritz Leiber

  He realized he was putting a question to the Sanctuary Control Chief. "Any news of the Fourth Circle priest Jarles?"

  The face in the televisor grew more troubled. "Yes, your reverence, and in an unexpected connection. One of the guards has been revived. He asserts that it was none other than Jarles who engineered the escape! I will let you know what story the others tell."

  The panel went blank as Goniface terminated the interview. He felt no resentment toward Jarles for his treachery, nor even toward himself for having trusted Brother Dhomas' handiwork too much—only a mild disappointment.

  Jarles is gone, too, the voice was saying. But what's the difference? All of them are gone, or have ceased to matter. Nothing matters any longer. Come back, Knowles Satrick. Complete the cycle.

  The under-thoughts had engulfed all except the most superficial portions of his mind, though he was still listening to reports, studying the world map, issuing orders, giving or refusing advice. The affairs of the Hierarchy seemed very far away—trivial, as though the Hierarchy were jog-trotting down some unimportant bypath in time. Only the mystery of his personal destiny seemed to have significance. Knowles Satrick—Knowles Satrick. He would eagerly follow that voice if he could ever discover in what direction it was calling him—and if it proved to be a direction a man could follow.

  The face of a minor priest appeared in his televisor. Vaguely he remembered that his secretary had mentioned a second communication from Sanctuary Control Center. At sight of Goniface, the minor priest drew back startledly. Then, apparently fearing that this might be interpreted as an affront, he grew haltingly apologetic.

  "Your pardon, your supreme eminence. But I was sure, in spite of what they told me, that your supreme eminence could not be at Web Center. I handle communications for the portion of the Sanctuary which contains your apartments, and for the past few minutes I have been receiving messages from them. I have previously had the honor of hearing your supreme eminence speak, and I was sure that I recognized your voice, although the connection was not wholly satisfactory—"

  "What messages?" asked Goniface.

  "That's the strangest part of it, your reverence. Just a name. Repeated over and over again. A commoner's name. Knowles Satrick."

  To Goniface, in his present trancelike, visionary state of mind, this frightening coincidence seemed neither a coincidence nor frightening. It was something that, it seemed now, he had known would happen. So the voice was only calling him to his own apartments? He had expected a much longer journey.

  What did surprise him a little was the casual sound of his own voice asking a question.

  "You say you heard my voice coming from my apartments? You didn't see my face in the televisor panel there?"

  "No, your supreme eminence, but I did see something else—something that perplexes me. I'll flash it on to you if it's still there."

  The face of the minor priest disappeared. For a moment the panel was blank. Then Goniface was looking across his desk in his own apartment. Propped up so that its image filled the televisor panel, was a shadowy oblong of grayish paper, of the sort that commoners used. On it he could make out the same archaic black letters that he had already seen printed in his mind. Knowles Satrick.

  Goniface stood up, signing to Brother Jomald to take control temporarily. He felt very calm. It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that he should go to his apartments to see what was written on the other side of the paper. More than natural. Inevitable. Preordained.

  Outside the gallery door his escort rose to accompany him, but he shook his head. This was his journey—no one else's. As he walked the corridors unaccompanied, he felt that he was in an altogether different time-stream from that of the hurrying, taut-faced priests around him. A retrograde time-stream.

  You're coming back, Knowles Satrick. You're completing the cycle. It's been a long journey, Knowles Satrick, but now you're coming home.

  He entered his apartments. They were in semi-darkness. He picked up the oblong of gray paper in front of the televisor. The other side was blank.

  He looked up. Standing in the doorway of the inner rooms was a woman clad in the drab homespun of a commoner. Despite the darkness he could see her plainly, as if she faintly glowed. It was the witch Sharlson Naurya. And —for now the conclusiveness of the resemblance could not be denied—it was also his sister Geryl.

  For the moment his trancelike state vanished entirely, being replaced by an icy alertness. What, in the name of reason, had he been doing? He had walked into the Witchcrafts trap.

  His old nature reasserted itself. Almost he smiled. So this was how the Witchcraft hoped to frighten and coerce him? A trap, indeed, a psychological trap, but not quite good enough.

  Violet energy lashed from his outstretched hand. For a frightful moment it did not seem to affect the figure at all. Then the homespun flared, the face blackened. A disfigured, dissolving thing, it collapsed back into the inner room, out of his range of vision. In his nostrils was the odor of burned flesh.

  For a moment he felt the surge of a great personal triumph. It was as if he had defeated his own past, come to engulf him. He had reaccomplished his last murder, tardily but once and for all. His past was dead forever. The voice which still seemed to be calling him back no longer had any hold over him.

  But, almost in the same moment, he realized that this seeming victory was an unreal thing. That it was his Neodelos—the last great flare-up of his old energy; and from there the way went all downhill.

  For out of the inner door, unsinged by the flames that had destroyed her, softly walked Geryl in the same drab homespun.

  And behind her followed a queer procession. A gaunt old woman who limped on a crutch. A very old priest whose jowls, once fat, had now grown loose and flabby. A dull-faced, surly commoner a little older than himself. Another priest and several more commoners, most of them very old.

  You've completed the cycle, Knowles Satrick. You're through with it. It's all over. It might as well never have happened.

  For that silent procession was made up of the people he had murdered. But they were not as he last remembered them, not as they were when they had died. Had they been, he might have suspected some guileful deception—and have had the strength to act on that suspicion.

  Like Geryl, they were as they would have been had they lived until today, aging in normal fashion. These were no thin ghosts, but the solid phantoms of a materialist's hell—the hell of an alternate time-stream which had swirled out to engulf him. He had not killed them at all. Everything had been canceled out. Or he had killed them and they had continued to live—elsewhere.

  Asmodeus had been right. There was more to it than mummery. And the more was horrible.

  They circled him where he stood at the desk, eyeing him coldly, without hate.

  He noted that the dark outlines of the room had changed. The shadow masses were different.

  One last despairing flicker of skepticism—they might be telesolidographic projections of a diabolically artful sort. With an effort that he knew could not be repeated, he blindly groped outward, touched the nearest one—Geryl.

  He touched substantial, living flesh.

  Then Hell closed round him, like the clang of a prison door.

  It was not so much terror he felt, or guilt—though in a sense he was enduring the extremes of both emotions—but an all-encompassing realization of doomful predestination, a complete surrender of will power because he was faced with forces which could nullify all the achievements of will power.

  In front of him a little square of light leaped into being. It was a moment before he recognized Brother Jomald's face in the televisor panel, another moment before he remembered who Brother Jomald was. Even then it was as if he were looking at a picture which chanced to resemble someone he had known a long, long time ago, in another life.

  "Your eminence. We have been deeply concerned for your safety. No one knew your whereabouts. You will return at once to Web Center? There i
s an emergency."

  "I will remain where I am," answered Goniface, almost with a touch of impatience. What a futile, chattery creature was this ghost! "Ask your questions."

  "Very well, your eminence. The situation at Neodelos has again grown grave. It was not the clear victory it seemed at first. After the first successes there its priesthood has had no more. Power Center there is again threatened. Meanwhile, Mesodelphi and Neotheopolis are both invaded. In view of what has happened at Neodelos, shall we order similar counterattacks at both those Sanctuaries?"

  With difficulty Goniface recalled some of the problems of that ghostly time-stream in which the Hierarchy was dying. They seemed as remote as the affairs of another cosmos.

  He lifted his eyes to the circle of old faces around him. They spoke no word, but one and all shook their heads. He particularly noted the little toss, jerky now with age, of his mother's haggard features. He knew it so well.

  They were right. The Hierarchy was fading from that other time-stream, even as he had faded. And it was best that it fade swiftly.

  "Cancel all counterattacks," he said, the words forming themselves effortlessly. "Suspend all such operations—until tomorrow.

  For that dying time-stream, tomorrow would never come.

  There followed what seemed to Goniface a pointless and tedious argument with the ghost of Brother Jomald. Yet Goniface persisted, for he felt that the fading of the Hierarchy was a necessary and essential consequence of his own fading. It, too, had a cycle to complete. It, too, must return to its beginnings.

  And all the while, beneath Jomald's objections and oppositions, Goniface sensed—dimly, as if it were an emotion remembered from another incarnation—a frightened and tired willingness to terminate all struggles and tensions, a thankfulness that the end was at last in sight.

  Finally, Jomald said, "I will obey your commands, but I cannot take sole responsibility. You must speak to the Apex Council and the Staff."

  And now a little picture of Web Center filled the square of light. Those pygmy ghosts seemed to be looking at him.

  "Cancel all counterattacks," he repeated. "Suspend all such operations—until tomorrow."

  It was strange to think that that ghost world still had a dim existence, stranger still to think that the ghost name of Goniface should mean so much in it.

  More words with Jomald then. With monotonous regularity, messages of Hierarchic defeat. Ever-deepening gloom. Tragedy of a time-stream dying.

  Finally a note of frightened yet futile urgency.

  "Cannot contact Cathedral Control Center here at Megatheopolis. Chief Observation Post reports that Cathedral war blast no longer flares. Chief Observation Post cut off. Shall order counterattack?"

  For a last time Goniface raised his eyes. But he knew beforehand that the answer would be "No," and that he would give that answer to the frantic yet hopeless question. This time he particularly noted the senile, pendulum-like headshake of the old priest, his first confessor.

  "Disturbance at Sanctuary Control Center. Light failing. Priests fleeing into Web Center report a blackness, with eyes, flowing down the corridors, engulfing them. No word from Power Center. Counterattack?"

  But Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.

  "Doors burst open. Blackness. Shall order—"

  Goniface made no answer. As the panel went black—but not because it had gone dead—as, to his seeming, the time-stream died, his feeling of resignation became complete.

  He did not know that, in the under levels of his thinking, he was holding tight to one last defense against the forces which had engulfed him.

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  Chapter 20

  Daylight had come back to Megatheopolis, bathing the terraces of the Sanctuary with a white splendor. There was a general feeling of emptiness and of dazed relief, as when, after a great hurricane, fisherfolk come out on the beach to talk in hushed voices of the might of the storm and of the damage it has wrought, to peer curiously at the wreckage washed ashore and incredulously at the high-water marks of last night's waves.

  Such a feeling was apparent in the faces of the commoners who wandered about the terraces in small groups—and not too many of those, for the victors in last night's struggle were determined to keep matters well in hand. Later on the commoners would begin to talk in loud voices and poke at things and pry, but for the present they touched nothing, said little. Their eyes and their minds were too busy.

  They kept meeting priests who were wandering about even more aimlessly than themselves. At such times they merely stepped aside to avoid each other, without comment. Most of the priests wore ragged black armbands, perhaps torn from the robe of a dead deacon, to indicate that they had changed sides, although no one as yet had asked them to.

  Occasionally the terraces were crossed by a man or woman who walked briskly and obviously knew what he or she was doing. Most of these wore a simple black tunic, but a few were still clothed as commoners or even as priests. On the shoulders of some peering familiars perched, like trained monkeys.

  Necks were craned as a faint hissing broke the silence. Looming over the intervening structures, the Great God's head was visible. A light scaffolding had been set up on the shoulders, and pygmy figures were setting to work in a businesslike way. There was the flicker of tiny blue flames.

  Onto the topmost terrace four figures issued—one in the scarlet and gold of an archpriest; two in black tunics; one—a woman—in drab homespun.

  "Yes, it was very simple," Sharlson Naurya was saying, and the after-the-storm emptiness was apparent in her words. "No alternate time-stream, no dead come alive, nothing like that. But it was what Asmodeus had devised for you long ago, and so it worked—though the emergency forced us to make some changes. It was your familiar who influenced your thoughts by telepathy. Likewise it was he who called your name from your apartments. With one exception, the ghostly figures that appeared to you were telesolidographic projections, reconstructed on the basis of old duplicate solidographs preserved in the Hierarchic Dossiers of Commoners, the effect of normal aging being achieved by painstaking retouching. Telesolidographic projections also accounted for the seeming change in your room.

  "You would have known that they were solidographs, except that you touched me and found me real. I placed myself in such a way that it would be me you touched. My clothes were impregnated and my skin filmed with a faintly glowing preparation, so that I would resemble the others.

  "You found I was real—and yet you knew I could not be real, for you had just destroyed me with your wrath beam. There lay Asmodeus' clinching subtlety. When you first saw me in your apartments, you saw a telesolidographic projection. That was what you destroyed. A sequence showing its blackening and dissolving had been faked and was switched on by the operator as soon as you activated your wrath ray. You may remember the time lag.

  "Had the scheme failed, as by some error in timing, you would instantly have been killed and an alternate plan adopted. But it was better to let you live and make use of your power over the Hierarchy, to defeat it, than to kill you and by that action perhaps jar your overawed subordinates into taking over your responsibilities and the supreme command. Asmodeus died, but the Witchcraft triumphed, because there were those who could and did succeed him. With you it was just the other way."

  Goniface did not reply. Once again his face was a mask—to hide his bitter, nauseous self-contempt. But he was not altogether without consolation. For he knew that the Hierarchy would still win out, although with no credit to himself. Almost slyly, he turned his head and looked beyond the Sanctuary walls. On this side, away from the commoners' section, lay the Blasted Heath, an arid gray expanse of many acres, on which no vegetation grew
. His gaze lingered there knowingly.

  "All my life I have looked forward to this moment," he heard Sharlson Naurya say, and there was a weariness apparent in her voice. "As if all my life I had been falling from the bridge and looking up at your face and willing the miraculous moment to come when I would be able to reach up and pull you after me. Now the moment has come and it means very little."

  The oddly distorted shadow of a man entered her field of vision. She looked up. The Black Man raised his hand in greeting. Dickon was responsible for the distortion. From his shoulder-perch he imitated his brother's greeting. His fur was a gorgeous golden red in the sunlight.

  "I have just come from Web Center," the Black Man explained. "We have established contact with our forces in most of the key cities. There only remains the mopping-up of a few small towns and rural sanctuaries."

  Without any animosity, but with frank curiosity, he looked at Goniface, who slowly turned back from his contemplation of the Blasted Heath. The glances of the two leaders met.

  At that instant there came a distant roaring that grew momently louder, a curiously profound throbbing and drumming that seemed to shake the ground. Those wandering on the terrace gazed quickly toward the head of the Great God and the workmen who were still busy around the neck. But the new sound was too big for that.

  Its thundering filled the sky. Something was coming from the sun, darkening it.

  There was a sluggish triumph in Goniface's eyes, as he held those of the Black Man. "You've won," he said, "but now you've lost. Late but not too late comes the aid we summoned from Heaven, bringing enough military machines to turn the tide and win back the scantily armored Earth."