The Last Guardian of Everness

by John C. Wright

  And he handed the sword to Koschei.

  IV

  The frozen, numb sensation that had been in Raven’s hand, now, the moment he let go of the sword, seemed to travel up his arm and gather in his chest, a heavy lump of ice. It felt solid, as if it would never leave his heart again.

  Koschei bent over the boy on the table and cut his chest open with the sword. Into the slit he put his armored hand.

  “Koschei, wait!” shouted Raven.

  Koschei did not turn, but remained bent over his task. “What need you now from me, mortal fool? Thanks and gratitude?”

  “I should have attacked you with that sword!”

  “I am a necromancer. I know in what part of himself each man keeps his life hidden. Mine was hidden in my heart; therefore I have removed my heart. While it is true I take no joy in life, no love, no pleasure, and I must take the joy of others to stir my blood, it is also true that I cannot be harmed by this weapon. I am without a heart, and Pity cannot touch me.”

  Koschei lifted his hand out from the boy’s chest, and, in his palm, there was a pearl of crystal, holding a floating flutter of bright and joyful fire in its center, like the leaves of a tree in autumn, or the wings of a red-gold butterfly, beating.

  “Wait! Stop!” Raven shouted. He stepped forward uncertainly, but his head was only as tall as Koschei’s elbow, he could not bring himself to try to grab that bone-covered, thin body. The same revulsion which makes a man unwilling to touch a corpse stopped him.

  Koschei brushed him aside and floated toward the door, his bony armor rustling and creaking, his huge black robes billowing like sails.

  Without turning his helmeted, crowned head, Koschei spoke softly: “Why do you repent your deed, mortal man? The eldest and first of all your kind let his love for his wife expel him from the garden of paradise; and his eldest son committed the same crime as you. Your first ancestor was a fine and stalwart man, much braver, wiser and better than you, yet even the father of your race was not immune to pity for his wife. I will say to you what I first told him. It is true your wife will hold you in low contempt. But at least she will be at hand to hate you. Comfort yourself with that.”

  And Koschei was gone.

  5

  Beyond the Gates

  of

  Greater Slumber

  I

  She was sound asleep, drugged, undreaming. And so she did not see nor dream of the thin shadow which stooped over her, did not feel the chill radiating from the dry bones of his armor, did not know with what pain and what reluctance he let go of the little crystal orb of beating flame, did not sense the little orb, warm as spring sunlight, drifting down, fragrant and soft, to touch her parted lips. But she smiled when the bubble popped, and warm spirits breathed into her smile, settling, bringing a rosy blush to her cheek. Her eyes moved beneath lids delicate as petals, for she had begun to dream.

  With a hiss of malice and longing and envy and despair for that living light now gone (for he had so wanted to keep it for himself, despite that he could never use it, nor feel its warmth) the thin shadow of the necromancer now moved aside from her, stepped through the door, and, drawing mist about him, stood motionless.

  Hands lax, face dead, without even the strength to gnaw on himself for spite, the necromancer waited and waited, hating the cold in his bones.

  II

  Wendy, lying in the hospital bed, was suddenly overcome with a sensation of great pleasure and well-being. The pains that had been in her body for these many weeks now, throbbed, ebbed, and departed.

  She raised her arms and slid back her sleeves and looked at the flesh of her arms in the moonlight; they were clear and without bruises. Even the tiny scar on her arm for the intravenous needle had vanished.

  The dull, cottony drowsiness in which the tranquilizers and painkillers had wrapped her had vanished; leaving only a clean, clear kind of restfulness.

  Wendy looked out the window up at the moon, at the stars flying in the deep darkness of heaven above silvery clouds. “Whoever is up there watching me,” she said, “I’d like to thank you a lot, and I’d like to say I never lost faith in you. I always knew miracles happen, no matter what everyone says. I’ve seen them before. People are so silly when it comes to miracles. The ones that happen every day: sunrises, childbirth, love; people don’t think they’re miracles just because they happen every day. The ones that don’t happen every day: healings, flying; people don’t believe in them because they’ve never seen them just because they don’t happen every day.”

  She snuggled down into the pillows. “But I always knew it could happen.”

  III

  It may have been only a moment later, or an hour, or an endless time, when Wendy saw a young man, dressed in silver armor and carrying a spear, with a web of starlight woven like a scarf in his helmet, step down through the window on a beam of moonlight.

  “I must be asleep!” said Wendy.

  The young man stared around the hospital room in bewilderment. “I must have passed through the Gates of Lesser Slumber. This looks like modern-day earth! Where’s my body?”

  “Have you lost your body?”Wendy asked in a voice of concern. “That’s terrible. You’re not a ghost, are you? Poor thing!” And, after she thought a moment, one finger against her cheek, she said brightly, “If there’s anything I can do to help you get your body back, I’d love to help.”

  The young man looked around the room, slow puzzlement growing on his features. “Why would I dream about a hospital? The woman who talks like a girl probably represents innocence, or maybe lost hopes. But a hospital? As if my hopes were dead or dying. That’s a scary thought.”

  “I just got better,” offered Wendy helpfully. “Besides, I’m the one who’s dreaming you’.’

  “I hate it when dreams say that.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, staring at the window with a brooding look. The bedsheet did not wrinkle nor did the bed depress where he sat, as if he were weightless. The spear, which he dangled idly in one hand, glistened like crystal, colors of predawn dew drops shivering along its slender blade.

  “I really do hate it when dreams say that. But I guess it represents my desire to reach the real world again. I wish Grandpa would come upstairs to wake me up already. I’ve got to tell him what’s going on. Vindyamar is fallen; the sea-bell is cracked; the Black Ships of Nastrond are afloat. We’ve been betrayed. Damn it! I hate this symbolic junk! It’s easier in the Deeper Dreaming. The things there are more . . .” He waved his spear at the moon. “Sort of more ancient. More grand. Huge.”

  Wendy said. “I had a dream I was talking to a flying pony. It looked sort of like a slender horse, with the head of a deer. Imagine a horse as a ballerina. That’s what it was like.”

  He grunted unhappily. “Of course I’d have to dream about the dreamcolts. She told me she would bring me back to my body, but this doesn’t look like my house. She’s probably turned against us too. Where’s my house?”

  Wendy said: “She told me there was a house called Everness, in the east. The forgotten last guardians of dreaming keep shut the gate between the waking world and the world of deep nightmare. She said the gate was broken, and the first servant of the Emperor of Night had entered our lands.” Wendy said. “But why did I dream it happened when I was a child?”

  “Childhood memories are partway into the other world already,” the young man said absentmindedly. “The same reason why children and innocent madmen can talk to imaginary playmates. They’re actually reaching from the waking to a person in the dream.”

  Then the young man straightened, turned to look at her, his eyes wide with shock. “Oh my God! You’re real! Don’t—don’t get up! Don’t move or try to turn on the light or anything. You’re in a half-awake state called somniloquism. You might jar yourself awake if you try to move. Now, if you write down everything, and I mean everything, right when you get up, and before you get out of bed or do anything else, then you might not forget this conversation. W
ill you promise to do that for me? Promise? It’s real important. Maybe the most important thing in the world.”

  “I promise,” said Wendy solemnly. “But only if you tell me the whole story. You see,” she said in a confidential whisper, “I love stories.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He blinked. “Uh. . . my name is Galen Waylock. I’m asleep right now in an old uncomfortable house in upstate Maine with no plumbing, on the coast, near Bath.”

  “How do you do. My name is Wendy Ravenson. It actually says Wendy Varovitch on my driver’s license, but that’s sort of hard to say, don’t you think?”

  “Okay. Sure. Uh . . . Okay, first there’s this horn, which is used to wake the sleeping guardians of the West. No, wait. Okay. The First Warden of Everness comes from when Zeno was Emperor and St. Hormidas was Pope. His people fought the Saxon at the battle of Badon Hill. The Saxon worshipped the Dragon-steeds who were the Cherubim and Charioteers of Morningstar, which were drawn into the world through the Tower of Vortigern. One dragon was white, and the other was red, and the Founder bound them up. No. Let me skip to the important stuff. The Founder is being punished because he betrayed his oath. He opened the postern gate to the Dream-realm and let a plague of insanities, soul thieves, and familiars into the souls of waking men. Throughout all the Dark Ages, the mass insanities, witch riots, villages getting up and dancing themselves to death, visions of ghosts and imps and demons, all that stuff, sprang out of his crime. The Second Warden, Donblais le Fay, seized control of the Tower after his father was locked away and drove the druids out of Avalon . . . Hold it. I have to back up. The Tower is where the Gate was. Is. It is the Tower of Time at the Center of the Seasons, with four wings and twelve porches. But you don’t know what Gate. Uh. Okay. In the old days, there wasn’t any barrier between mankind and the dream-world, and men were pretty much the slaves and playthings of the gods and faeries and spirits. So, in order to create a bicameral frame of consciousness, a boundary of mist was decreed to allow men to forget their fears and false hopes when they were in the sunlight; but one of the dream-lords rebelled out of Mommur, the City Never- ending, and drew a third part of the hosts of the greater powers with him. Their chief is named after the morning star, and he is also called the Emperor of Night, and he and his hordes fell into the deep of the sea, below where the beams of the sun can reach, in Acheron, a sunken city of imperishable metal, drowned in a black sea-chasm where their only light is from the pale glow of luminous monster-fish. The city is actually called Dis, but it is unlucky to say its name, so we call it after the river that springs from its barred windows, from the tears of those imprisoned there. Now, the Emperor of Night sent ambassadors to the nine races of the nine worlds, including the selkie of Heather Blether . . . no, wait. You don’t need to know that. Uh . . . the Regent of the Sun, Belphanes, at Oberon’s command, sent the unicorn as his messenger to the King of Logres. Eurynome the Unicorn established the Rule of the Order of Everness, and opened the gate between Pan’s and Morpheus’ realm, the realm of nature and the realm of dream. Morpheus . . . well, never mind who he is. Eurynome gave us the Horn, or maybe the Founder found the Horn by following her back to her own realm, which isn’t in this realm, or in the dream realm, but is supposed to be somewhere else entirely. Or it used to be. . . No . . . um . . .” He had stood and was pacing the room, his scale-mail jingling, waving his hands. Little shimmers of light traveled up and down the length of the spear, soft as moonlight, as he was waving it.

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?” asked Wendy, batting her eyelashes innocently.

  “Well! I don’t know where to start! Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said primly, clasping her hands before her on the bedsheet. “Why don’t I ask you questions, and you can tell me one thing at a time?”

  “Great,” muttered Galen. “Sounds just great.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “No, no. Just go ahead your way.”

  “First, why did I have my dream about something I remembered from childhood with the colt in it?”

  He sat down, drawing a deep breath. Galen spoke with forced slow patience. “Your childhood memories were probably the only thing she could reach. Creatures like her can only speak to people who are on drugs or who are not quite right in the head. The Seventy-Third Warden, Albertus Way- lock, wrote a monograph on it, and his theory is that they are permitted to keep their memories of the hidden things because people won’t listen to them anyway, but just stick them into psycho wards or something. Say, what kind of hospital did you say this was?” Galen shot a skeptical glance at Wendy.

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “Euryale, daughter of Eurynome, one of the dream-colts who are the children of the unicorn. We ride them. They fly.”

  “Why are you dressed like that?” Wendy waved her hand toward his silver-tinted scale-mail, the flowing garments of tissue that showed at the armor’s joints, at the lambrequin floating like mist from the peak of his conical helmet.

  “It’s a uniform. It’s symbolic. This is armor. It stops pointed things from jabbing you. This here is a spear. You poke it into things. Are you going to ask me some real questions? There’s a creature who is coming across the mist trying to get into this world. It may be here already.”

  Wendy wagged a finger at him. “Now, now. Let’s go in order. Where do you live?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”

  Wendy began plucking at her covers, “Well, if you won’t cooperate, I guess I’ll just wake up and try to put this silly dream behind me . . .”

  “No no no! Don’t get up! Uh, you look really tired, like you need a nap, and I got to tell you what’s going on! I’ll answer your stupid questions. I mean, no, I didn’t mean they were stupid or anything. What was the question?”

  Wendy said brightly, “I’d like to know where you live, dressed that way.” She giggled.

  “Yeah. I live at Everness House. On earth, that’s at number 14 Rural Route AA, Sagadahoc County, Maine. In the dreaming, the High House is at the Shore of the Sea of Unquiet Dark, last bastion of the City Never- ending, on the First Sphere this side of Utgard and Nidvellir, where the silver towers of Tirion rise unfallen, below the Deeper Gate, at the center of the four moon’s quarters. Can’t miss it.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Look. I wasn’t trying to find you. I went to go talk to the First Warden. He lives in the shadow of Tirion Unfallen, beneath the dark moon, where the ocean plunges forever into the Starlessness. There are nine waterfalls which fly off the brink of the Chasm Ultimate, and on the cliffsides below there is a place of torment called Wailing Blood. I went to him because a bird carrying an elf-lamp told me to. In a dream.”

  “I know that that’s very important,” said Wendy. “But I’d really like to know something else first. What led you here?”

  “There is a prayer to summon a dream-colt. A spell. They can fly across the sea from one moon to another, or ascend to other spheres.”

  “And the dream-colt brought you here for no reason, instead of taking you home like you asked?”

  “I see what you’re getting at. You and I must be connected in some way. A shared destiny or common link; otherwise, our dreams wouldn’t touch. The Forty-Third Warden wrote a treatise on it in the Library. He talked about. . . wait a minute . . . oh, God. Maybe I can’t go home. Maybe talking to you is the closest I can get. Maybe I’m d—uh. Hey, what day is it? What month? Omigod. What year?”

  Wendy told him the date.

  Grief and shock overtook Galen’s features. “I’ve been asleep for six months . . .”

  He sat down on the bed, phosphorescent spear across his lap. Then, as slowly as a crumbling tower, he leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

  Wendy reached and patted him gently on the knee. “There, there. Don’t be sad. Worse things happen at sea. I know. My husband used to go to sea, and worse things happened. Now straighten up. Draw a deep breath. Settle down and tell me what happened to
you. You went to see the First Warden, the one who’s being punished for something, in the place by the waterfalls at the edge of the world in the dream-land. Tell me in order how you got there and what you talked to him about. What’s the first thing you said after you got there?”

  “The first thing he said was that he was going to dump me into the abyss . . .”

  IV

  Galen, unnerved by the threat and trying to remember his boldness, looked Azrael de Gray in the eye, and held up his hand, to show the tiny scar in his palm. “See? I came for your message. I am here because I was summoned. You called, I remembered, I came. You have no right to threaten me. You have no cause to hate me.”

  Only silence answered him.

  An uncomfortable half-minute crept by. Galen plucked up his nerve and spoke again. “Uh . . . sir. I came because I heard the sea-bell toll. After all these years of waiting, our waiting is over.”

  Silence.

  Galen tried again: “You started our House! You set us all to waiting. We’ve done as you asked, my grandfather and great-grandfather and everyone all the way back. Doesn’t that count for something? And now everyone is in danger, everyone on Earth, and the hosts of the Darkness are marching. I came to you for help. You said you had something we needed to know. Even if you don’t care about your own family, doesn’t the whole Earth count for something?”

  He spoke with as much dignity and force as he could muster. Moments passed, with Azrael looking on with steady, cold, supercilious gaze, and Galen began to feel stupid and small.

  Azrael’s shadowy face showed no hint of softening, no flicker of compassion. Finally, he said in a quiet, icy voice, “No cause for hate, you say? Tell me, I challenge you, the names of those on Earth who recollect with praise my deeds, or even know that one such as I once lived. None has come here to offer even smallest ease of this great unceasing suffering, which, for their sakes, I endure.”