The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Since several of us were in conference, Bobly and Bab had gone down to the stream for water, Michael and Dismé were "picking wild strawberries" (an unseasonable excuse, at best), and I was less threatening than Tamlar, I summoned him over with a gesture and offered him morning tea, which he accepted.

  "My name is Mace Marchant," he said. "I used to be head of the Apocanew office of Inexplicable Arts."

  "What does used to be' mean?" I asked him, in as gentle a voice as I could manage.

  "It means I don't want to be connected to it anymore, not to any of it. It's because I loved this woman. Rashel..."

  My ears pricked up at that, for during our long drive, Dismé had told me everything she could remember about Rashel, including her end.

  "... but she wasn't in love with me. I think she put a spell on me, or someone did, so I would love her. And because I knew her, the Warden of the College of Sorcery dragged me along to meet this ... this sorcerer. Gohdan Gone? Do you know that name?"

  I told him we knew the name and we knew where, in Apocanew, he had resided.

  "Apocanew? Really? The warden took me to a place in Hold. He, Gone, told me I could go, but he kept the warden there, and Gone killed the warden. I heard some of it, through the grates in the streets. It was..." He had to set his cup down, for he was shaking. Galenor glanced at me from his position with the group, and I beckoned. He came to stand behind the wretched man, laying a firm hand on his shoulder.

  "Is that what you wanted to tell us?" I asked.

  The shaking stopped, and he said, "No. Not all. When I was there, before they told me to go, I saw a book. I noticed it because it moved, as though it had something alive inside it. On the cover it said, 'The Book of Fell.' And when I heard the Guardians had come, when I heard that Bastion would be cleansed of all that, well, I thought you should know about the book..." He picked up the cup and sipped at it. "Such books ... grimoires, are like collections of evil spells, aren't they? Sources of dark power, and this one looked very, very old."

  As he set his cup down, he glanced up at the person behind him, and rose, crying, "Jens Ladislav?"

  "Galenor the Guardian," came the reply, in such tones of awful power that the poor man was quite stricken, a state made even worse when Dismé came out of the trees.

  "That's Rashel's sister," he whispered. "They killed Rashel."

  I gave Galenor a forbidding look and told Marchant that indeed, Rashel was dead. I saw no reason to upset him with the details when he would need his wits about him in telling Arnole and the others what he had seen. They gathered around and began to question him, at which point Elnith joined the group, and we soon had his life's story among us. When we had drained him quite dry of useful information (including the location in Hold of Gone's place and Mace's destruction of the warden's documents, which quite frankly surprised me, for he didn't look capable of stepping on a stinkbug), we fed him and suggested he join a nearby demon encampment in case we needed him for anything further.

  Bertral said firmly, "He's right about the book of Fell. There is now a reference to it in my Book. The only way we'll know we've destroyed it is to see it done."

  "Let Aarond and Ialond go as children," Tamlar suggested. "Gohdan Gone slaughtered many children. Let them say to the servants of this necromancer that they have been summoned. I will follow them into the lair, and together we will find the book."

  Hussara nodded. "That may gain you entrance, but let Volian and Wogalkish walk with me to the street where this entry is, to wait there for the book to emerge or for Aarond's call. It may be a more difficult task than you imagine."

  "All of us," said Tamlar, her voice crackling. "If it is to be a difficult task, then we will all be needed.

  Elnith decided to go with the small ones, and if Elnith went, I had to go along. The journey was made more quickly than I could have imagined, quite as though we giants were striding in the magical seven-league boots I had read of in fairy tales as a child. Giants did not knock upon the gate, however. It was just Bobly and Bab and Nell who knocked upon the gate, in our own unthreatening guises. The street was empty, but the gate was just as Mace Marchant had described it, as was the dwarfish, hairy person who came to greet us. I felt a spasm of pure revulsion when I saw it, an instinctive loathing. The creature tittered and pranced, but after a bit of this it decided to admit us, though he said his Master was away.

  Below, at the end of long corridors, we found another gate, guarded by another such, who said Master wasn't home, to which we replied as before. We had been summoned. We would await the Master. This creature led us to another door which a third monster opened, letting us into the room Merchant had told us of. Despite the smoldering fire that burned, the room was in virtual darkness. It smelled ... oh, how can I describe that smell. To me it was wet ashes, hot metal, rot, decay, blood, sewers, a stench the color of bruises. The chair stood beside the fire, heavy legs, arms, back, but the seat was only an empty frame over a precipitous hole that went endlessly down into darkness.

  The three of us just stood there, trying to breathe, hideously aware that the pit before us was not empty. Each of us knew it was occupied. Gohdan Gone had departed, but the power that had moved him was still here. Elnith had taken over once we entered, but she didn't insulate me from her fear, which I felt for the first time. She was suddenly, terribly afraid, taking a long moment to gain mastery of herself and reach out toward the book. It was on the table next to the chair, and I saw my own hand go out to grip it. It was like touching the base of a great cliff, immovable as mountains. My hand fumbled with it, unable even to open the cover.

  Outside the door, the creatures who had let us in were peeking at us, tittering. In the vast hole beneath us, something turned its attention toward us. Elnith felt it. So did Bobly and Bab, for Ialond and Aarond were suddenly there, laying their hands upon the book, struggling with it, unable to open it any more than Elnith had done. Elnith called, and from elsewhere Hussara and Volian and Wogalkish answered.

  We felt the cavern begin to shake. The floor shuddered beneath our feet, things fell from the shelves; we three moved against the outer walls just before the roof of the cavern came down, narrowly missing us. Light flooded in. It was noon, and the sunlight streamed downward into the abyss beneath the chair. We heard something from below uttering words we did not know, had never heard, strange words that went to our hearts and chilled them. Hussara leaned above us, with Volian, whose wind came down in a great vortex and scooped everything in that room away, upward, burning as it went, for Tamlar was there to burn it as it came. A sharper gust pulled out those small, tittering creatures who had served their master, and they too were burned as they swept up into the sunshine. With the earth riven wide, as it was, there was enough light in the place to see the book was not a separate thing. It was part of the stone beneath it, part of the bedrock beneath that, rooted into the substance of the planet.

  I felt Elnith summoning. We all stood as we were, without moving, hearing that movement from below, listening to it climb from the pit that held it. Then, suddenly, Dezmai and Jiralk came sliding down the sides of the pit that Hussara had made, she with her drums that Camwar had made for her, and he with Camwar's instrument. They stood tight against the wall, not to throw any shade into the pit, and Dezmai drummed, Jiralk strummed, and the two of them began to sing. Their voices twined like snakes mating, turning and twisting and lacing themselves together, pure purpose untroubled by thought or need, and we saw the cover of the book rise, only a tiny bit.

  Oh, from that book came such sounds and smells and tastes. The clangor of bars and gates, the rattle of chains. The shriek of imprisoned and tortured beings. The taste of blood on our lips. Dezmai drummed, Jiralk played, they sang, the cover opened, and the first page of the book rose up as Volian leaned above it and ripped it from its binding with her breath. It came loose with a sound of ripped metal, fluttering upward like a living thing, only to fold itself into a deadly arrow shape and plunge toward Volian's breast
.

  Tamlar caught it with one fiery hand and melted it with her breath, and the next, and the one after that.

  The book was thick. It held hundreds of pages, every page a history of some bestial cruelty mankind had committed against his own kind or other kinds. The first few were only sticks and stones used by one kind of proto man against another. Then came spears and slings, used to more purpose. Then horsemen, with bows and swords of bronze. I saw pyramids of skulls left in the lands conquered by marauding hordes; I saw living children thrown screaming into the flames of Moloch; I saw impalements without number, and crucifixions and burials alive; I saw blood poured upon high altars until the pyramids ran red to their bottoms. I saw wars of religion against religion and people against people. Every page was one such; every one had to be raised separately, separately ripped away, separately melted into a tiny blob of metal that writhed on the broken stone like mercury, crawling toward the dark. None escaped. Bobly and Bab caught them all, scooping them into a pitcher they had found among the wreckage.

  The farther we went into the book, the more recent the pages became. I saw despots releasing poison gas upon their people and others; I saw torture raised to an art form in the dungeons of police states; I saw hordes starved by their rulers; I saw the ovens, the gibbets, the laboratories, the suicide bombers, the blowers-up of busses, the terrorists, the nihilists, and I heard the lip-smacking of that being in the pit that fed on it, all of it, including the souls of those who had committed the acts.

  And near the end of the book I saw the Spared Ones repeating every evil man had ever invented. One by one the pages opened with cries and shrieks and howls and an outpouring of terrible spirits that stank of hatred. One by one they were silenced and the page was ripped away. One by one the pages rose on the wind like fallen leaves and were burned to the accompaniment of a far off sound, as of chains broken or walls fallen, or great cages rent wide.

  We did not know what or where the captives were that held that book in place, but when the last page was burned, there was only silence in that place and the scritching feet of a small, skittering black thing that tried to escape from between the book covers and flee. I brushed it to the floor; Ialond hit it with his hammer; and Tamlar burned the place where it was squashed. She also took the pitcher of crawling evil that Bobly and Bab had collected.

  "I will put it in the earthfires," she said. "Where it may stay forever, or as near as makes no difference."

  Then we left the place, quickly, for Hussara, Volian, Wogalkish, and Tamlar told us they intended to clean all the valleys of Bastion from their center at Hold to the Walls of the Mountains, collapsing every cavern upon itself and flooding it until it was clean, and opening every cave at either end so Volian and Tamlar could blow through it and burn every musty corner clean and bare.

  Then dust rose in monstrous clouds that shut out the sun. Flames ran across the valleys. They found Gone's habitation in Apocanew, and others like it elsewhere, but there was no other book. Span after span, the world shook and fires burned mightily, smoke and dust filling the air, until at last the wind came to blow it away and the rain poured down to settle it and put out the fires. When they were finished, the three valleys lay stricken before us, like vast open pit mines from the days before the Happening, all destroyed except for the fortress at the center of Hold, for it stood upon Tamlar's mound where the Guardians took up residence.

  Only then, my other children arrived. The doctor soon found a new friend in Geshlin, the Gardener. She is very lovely and she knows a great deal about the use of herbs in medicine. She arrived almost immediately after the cleansing of Bastion along with Tchandbur of the Trees (whom we had seen briefly at the Battle of the Plain), and with Ushel, the dweller of the Wilderness, whose charge is the creation and maintenance of variety, botanical and zoological and, for all I know, viral and bacterial as well. With Tchandbur's arrival, trees sprang up as though by ... well, as though by the power of the small god. We would go to sleep seeing a barren one night and awaken to find it a forest the next morning. We have flowers and fruits everywhere.

  Befun, the Guardian of Animals, dropped by with Pierees and Falasti, beautiful women both, with voices like singing birds and falling water, Pierees to fill the trees with birds and Falasti to fill the streams with fishes. With the arrival of Rankivian, Shadua, and Yun, all twenty-one of us were together for the first time, and we celebrated the occasion with a feast. Shortly thereafter, Bastion was entered by a group of anchorites who, it seems, have been followers of Elnith for several generations. Ben, a student of the doctor's, brought them to meet her, bringing a petition to build an abbey of the Silences on a forested hill in Praise. The anchorites take vows of silence, and even their meetings are silent. When Elnith attends their gatherings, I usually sleep through them.

  With the rooting out of the devil Fell, and the restoring of Bastion to a natural and beautiful place to live, we were ready to start separating sheep and goats, which, with the not-quite-willing cooperation of the demons, seems to be going well. Whenever the demons try to tell us that there is no small god (much less any Real One) Dezmai and Michael sing them into stupefication and I, Elnith, silence them for hours at a time. They go on working with us, nonetheless, because they are intent upon finding out how we do this. We continually find them searching places we have been for signs of the device we have supposedly used, though they as consistently refuse to believe our explanations. To the Chasmites, truth is determined by how well it fits their expectations, and doesn't that sound familiar?

  After Alan rounded up the survivors from the redoubt, the Chasmites sent a group to meet with the fifty of us sleepers who are left. The Chasmites are indeed, direct descendants of pre-Happening survivor scientists who managed to keep track of the years since it happened. Strangely enough, they have kept themselves separate from the rest of humanity for almost the same reasons the small god gave us for separating the race. Their initial reasoning was that if science had been pushed, hard, in the century prior to the Happening, mankind would have had some way to avoid the catastrophe. I mentioned that the small god said she brought the asteroid because of what man had become, and they retorted that man might not have become that if we had been relentless in our education of our young people and had not perpetuated ignorance under the guise of cultural sensitivity and the politically correct.

  I warned the people from Chasm to be careful in their research and behavior, for any cruelty to people or animals might be met with violence from the Guardians. When I speak about the Guardians to the Chasmites, however, they tend to turn off and swing their eyes over my shoulder to focus on infinity. They have the same reaction to mention of the small god or the Real One. They have consistently refused to have a god contest, and I fear they will have to encounter the godlet rather forcibly before they believe there is anything there at all.

  Arnole has set up a school at the fortress for the children of the recruits who are coming in. He calls it the university of the Real One, and it teaches only things that are known to be true, which means it is largely devoted to mathematics and sciences. Dismé and Michael have threatened to set up another school nearby which will teach only things known to be helpful, such as medicine, music, and horsemanship. Needless to say, no Regimic materials have remained except what is in the Archives of the Fortress.

  Camwar and Jens, Bobly and Bab, have arranged to join a caravan to New Kansas at the end of the year in order to carry the message of the small god and arrange for the first god-contest. As yet, we have heard nothing of the small god's threatened prophets, and Dismé and I have wondered if, indeed, her peroration on herself as deity was not hyperbole designed to rub our fur the wrong way. The impression I got was that the small god is not above amusing herself at our expense a great deal of the time.

  In speaking to Alan and the doctor, I have suggested we take a leaf from the Real One's book and focus on what is, which includes a few people on the moon and a growing population on Mars. Surprisi
ngly, the small god has said nothing at all about them, quite possibly because both places have small gods of their own (or they are worshipping The Real One, which is not unimaginable). What is may also include one aquatic and one arboreal intelligent race. We all guess cetaceans and gray parrots, and Falasti and Pierees have gone away to see if we are right.

  One year has passed since I last woke in the redoubt. Michael and Dismé are expecting a child in mid-fall. I feel like a grandmother. Alan says he feels like a grandfather, too, and though he is uncertain which of my children may also be his, he pretends to find in Michael a likeness to his grandfather. I don't think it matters, personally. Dismé sought me out to tell me the room set aside for a nursery was evidently invaded during the night, for a stone stands in the corner of it. This is, she believes, the twentieth stone, and she is driving Bertral mad wanting to see the book every hour on the hour to see who is about to be born.

  It is almost dinner time, and Alan and I have planned a special meal for our anniversary, just us and the children, any who happen to be nearby. This last account has filled the last page in my journal. Perhaps I will find another one and write more, as time passes. Then again, I may leave the story as it is.

  Signed: Nell Latimer Block.

  Summerspan ten, nineday,

  Year one of the Small God. Chasm date: 3052.