Awake in the Night Land

By John C. Wright

Published by Castalia House at Smashwords

Copyright John C. Wright 2014

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

Cover Design: Jartstar

Editor: Vox Day

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

Did ye live in those unknown, strange days,
When God and I conversed, and He, abroad
Upon my seething waters, spoke of you,
As of some thing that were to come at last,
In some dim future time when this round world
Was fitted for ye by the hands of Time?

—The Voice of the Ocean,
William Hope Hodgson (1921)

Dedicated to Andy Robertson

On the Lure of the Night Land

The tales in this book came into being by odd accident, and what is odder, received very generous praise from readers and critics alike. All were first published by Andy W. Robertson, to whom this volume is gratefully dedicated, but were then republished by such luminaries of the field as Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

In the life of every bookish person, there are a few favored books, read in the golden time of youth, that come to dwell in the imagination forever. The vividness of images, the strength of heroes, the beauty of heroines, the strangeness and wonder of the settings, are burned into the heart: every other tale read after is compared to these golden tales.

I had graduated college, and was past the age when the book of gold is found, and I was lamenting that I was, perhaps, too old and jaded to meet the wonders of youth again, when a friend recommended Hodgson’s The Night Land to me. I had told him once of a fantasy I was writing, called Nigh-Forgotten Sun (the unfinished manuscript still exists), and my friend thought that I was consciously copying the theme of Hodgson’s story: he was amazed that I had never heard of the book, since it was exactly suited to my own writing, both in style and theme.

So I read volume one of the Ballantine edition edited by Lin Carter. I found the golden time of youthful wonder was not past. What visions I saw!

At the time, poor as a church mouse (or, I should say, rather, poor as a law student) I had no resources to find whether the second volume was still in print. In the days before the Internet, libraries and used bookstores did not maintain inventory lists where a poor student could find them.

And so this antique tale, when I had reached the point where the nameless narrator stands before the darkened ruins of the Lesser Redoubt, which he endured much toil, heart-ache, terror and incalculable dangers to reach, instead of finding his love, his spirit senses, somewhere hidden in the metal structure, dread and fell presences waiting to destroy him. His beloved, and all her people, her culture, her world, have been wiped out. At that cliffhanger I was left, and I did not know if any copy of the ending of the tale survived.

To me it seemed as if I had found an antique sea-chest in an attic, or washed ashore from the wrack of Atlantis, containing only one half of a manuscript, and that I had no hope of ever finding the finish of the tale.

How precious that dog-eared paperback was to me! In the opening paragraphs of the first chapter, the narrator is speaking casually to Mirdath the Beautiful, a maiden of the gentry of the English rural countryside. A more comfortable and bucolic setting cannot be imagined. Then, when he says, 'It is an elf night; the Towers of Sleep rise' she answers by speaking of the Moon-Garden, the City of Twilight, and the Tree with the Great Painted Head.

By that word she reveals that she is like him: a soul that is more than mortal, that has lived other lives in other cycles of reincarnation, dimly half-forgotten.

She and he are both travelers from moon-lit elfin lands or empires of cloudy nightmare, and they hail from places far beyond the little fields we know, older than human history: they have seen the light of other suns, other days. They dance to music we cannot hear. No one of their own time will understand them.

I cannot express how eerie this seemed to me, how pregnant with secret promise. What reader of fantastic fiction has not seemed, to himself at least, to be a changling like this, someone who is more at home in stranger worlds than the mundane one around us? As a man who is out of tune with his own time (surely, dear reader, that is seen in the way I express my thought to you) I found delight to think that there might be, for me, too, a Mirdath the Beautiful awaiting.

Few books can match the strange promise of those hints: The Night Land overmatches it. In chapter two our narrator, mad with grief and loss, recovers memories from uncounted millions of years in the remotest future, long after the sun is dead, and he gazes from the embrasures of the Last Redoubt of Man upon the wonders and horrors of the Night Land: he sees the dim fires burning in the Giant’s Kilns; the single visible eye of the Southeastern Watcher shines from its hulking silhouette of its grim, huge head, unblinking; the Night-Hounds cry out, and the Silent Ones do not, and the doors of the House of Silence, in all eternity, have never closed.

Nothing I have ever read before or since contains such a mood of pure unearthliness. Wraiths and Dark Lords and devils from fantasy stories seem quaint and old-fashioned, and are more likely to invoke nostalgia rather than awe; aliens from science fiction stories share our laws of nature, and come from our universe. The inhuman presences and monsters of the Night Land, on the other hand, are cloaked in impenetrable mystery.

The stilted and archaic language, I find no fault with. Perhaps I am the only reader who does not. A language less formal and gravid might not serve to capture the dark, heavy, grim and gothic majesty of the piece. I know my friend Mr. Stoddard has made a brave attempt in this direction, but, for my taste, more might be lost than gained by modernizing the tongue.

Finally, after many years of wondering and waiting, I found the second volume. An archeologist finding the lost dialogs of Aristotle, the eighth book of Apollonius, or the missing ending to the epic of Lucretius could not know greater triumph than I did.

Here I met Mirdath the Beautiful, reincarnated as Naani, a daughter of the Lesser Redoubt. Many other readers find fault with her: let them. She is precious to me. I can think of no other character possessing her quirks, her cleverness, her playful heedlessness, her unparalleled bravery. She is self-sacrificing without being a martyr, shows both spirit and fortitude that would break any lesser lass, she is braver than a man and yet still humble and demure.

If I sound like a man infatuated, let this be a testament to the skill of Hodgson’s writing. Keep your joyless Galadriel, your spiteful Titania, your lascivious Helen, your treacherous Guinevere and deadly Clytemnestra, your cunning Penelope, your absurd Xena: to match her for charm, perhaps you can hold up Nausicaä or Miranda as her equals; to match her for courage and endurance, who is there?

The love-story that C.S. Lewis so casually dismisses as a fatuous erotic interest, I thought was almost Promethean in its power. Here is a man who reaches across a billion years of time, and braves the unthinkable dangers of the Night, to save the woman who is his own true love, because he hears in his mind the whisper of her plea for help, as if in a dream. By the mysterious aetheric sympathy they share, from far-off, he hears her voice in the night, and he knows her. Based only on that whisper, and his hope, into the eternal darkness, like Orpheus, he goes. (The only other story that is even close in its scope and power is “At the Eschaton” by Charles Sheffield, appearing in the Far Futures anthology. With apologies to Sheffield, I found the short story more striking than the novel-version). Neither all the aeons of eternity, nor all the darkness and horror of the hopeless night, nor even death itself, can part the lovers.

The Victorianisms other readers find galling, I find as refreshing as an oasis in a wasteland of ash. The way sex is handled in Stranger in a Strange Land or even The Left Hand of Darkness is the norm I was to meet, over and over again, unchanged, unchallenged, unquestioned, in every story I found in my childhood. The casual fornications of James Bond and Captain Kirk were presented as normal, their penismanship as praiseworthy. Self-control, chastity, romance, marriage, family, even though they are the most normal things in the world (I am tempted to say, the only normal things in the world) were dismissed by all modern writers as psychopathologies of the Dark Ages.

Perhaps when Heinlein first wrote the idea of having a sloppy sex-life might seem boldly non-conformist, and shocking. Now it is the conformity, and the only way boldly to shock the new conformists is to suggest that some sort of self-discipline in the sexual appetites might be useful, wise and comely.

Self-control, temperance, prudence, and moderation are values much praised by ancient pagan philosophers, the iron-hearted Stoics of Greece and Rome. Odd as this sounds, the final theme that endears the Night Lands to me is this very iron-heartedness: it is the kind of book a stoic might approve.

The universe is utterly hostile, utterly malevolent, incomprehensible, dark, brooding, malefic, and filled with dread. While there is reincarnation in this world, every indication in the text is that this is not a supernatural phenomenon, not a matter of religion, but of some yet-to-be-discovered science of etheric rays or spirit-vibrations.

In the Night Land, there are benevolent powers whose mysterious actions sometimes save a stranded wanderer. Hodgson might have added them to have something analogous to dolphins (which sailors' tall tales say aid drowning men), to contrast with his soul-destroying monsters, who circle the last redoubt of man as sharks follow a ship laden with bullocks.

But these are entities whose true purposes are unknown, who neither seek nor are given worship, and who appear only about as frequently as reports of UFO’s or Abominable Snowmen appear among modern men. They are not Valkyries, waiting to draw fallen heroes up to feast in Valhalla; they are not Mercury, waiting to escort shades to Elysium; and they are not angels waiting to welcome the faithful to paradise. Ultimately, there is no comfort to be had from them. There is no comfort to be found anywhere in Hogdson’s black and agnostic universe: save in the arms of love itself.

And, since this is a fairy tale, we are told the love can endure even if the eons change, even if the sun goes out, even if the beloved seems to die.

Like the real universe, the terror-haunted universe of The Night Land is both utterly hopeless, and utterly filled with hope: as inescapable as death itself, is love.

Years and years ago, I spent a dreamy summer inventing tales to set into Hodgson's background, imagining the culture, traditions, and lore, filling in bits of the history of the Last Redoubt, of the final race of man. I was certain that no one had ever read this book but me; I was sure such stories would never find a home. It seemed like providence, miraculous, that I came across Mr. Andy Robertson’s call for stories set in this background in a trade journal, after I had so long ago dismissed all hope of such a thing.

While my humble work falls appallingly short of Hodgson’s genius, to honor the favorite story of one’s young life by writing a story of one’s own, was a chance not often given to writers, for which my gratitude is endless. For honor him I ought: all the secret, youthful, golden places in my imagination are still touched by images and echoes from his work.

Still, I seem to behold the mighty Home of Man, surrounded by the sacred aura of its air-clog, windows and balconies ablaze, defying (though doomed to fall to them) the silent and motionless monstrosities crouching at its eaves; still the Silent Ones slide forward from the gray gloom, noiseless, draped in gauze.

In some place in my heart, the Masters of the Watch are always raising their weapons in salute to the brave and nameless traveler who stands at the valves of the gate leading out into the Night, with all lamps quenched, so that the horrors will not know a child of man creeps forth. Still the warm scent of the last kiss of Mirdath the Beautiful lingers on the bereaved lover's lips, though that kiss was kissed twenty-five million years ago; still he hears her voice across the nightland of a darkened world, calling.

Awake in the Night

Circa AD TWENTY-TWO MILLION

(Five million years before the final extinction of mankind)

1.

Years ago, my friend Perithoös went into the Night Lands. His whole company had perished in their flesh, or had been Destroyed in their souls. I am awake in the night, and I hear his voice.

2.

Our law is that no man can go into the Night Lands without the Preparation, and the capsule of release; nor can any man with bride or child to support, nor any man who is a debtor, or who knows the secrets of the Monstruwacans; nor a man of unsound mind or unfit character; nor any man younger than twenty-two years; and no woman, ever.

The last remnant of mankind endures, besieged, in our invulnerable redoubt, a pyramid of gray metal rising seven miles high above the volcano-lit gloom, venom-dripping ice-flows, and the cold mud-deserts of the Night Lands. Our buried grain fields and gardenlands delve another one hundred miles into the bedrock.

Night-Hounds, Dire Worms, and Lumbering Behemoths are but the visible part of the hosts that afflict us; monsters more cunning than these, such as the Things Which Peer, and Toiling Giants, and Those Who Mock, walk abroad, and build their strange contrivances, and burrow their tunnels. Part of the host besieging us is invisible; part is immaterial; part is we know not what.

There are ulterior beings, forces of unknown and perhaps unimaginable power, which our telescopes can see crouching motionless on cold hillsides to every side of us, moving so slowly that their positions change, if at all, only across the centuries. Silent and terrible they wait and watch, and their eyes are ever upon us.

Through my open window I can hear the roar and murmur of the Night Lands, or the eerie stillness that comes when one of the Silent Ones walk abroad, gliding in silence, shrouded in gray, down ancient highways no longer trod by any man, and the yammering monsters cower and hush.

3.

Before me is a brazen book of antique lore, which speaks of nigh-forgotten times, now myth, when the pyramid was bright and strong, and the Earth-Current flowed without interruption.

Men were braver in those days, and an expedition went north and west, beyond the land of the abhumans, seeking another source of the Earth-Current, fearing the time when the chasm above which our pyramid rests might grow dark. And the book said Usire (for that was the name of the Captain), had his men build a stronghold walled of living metal, atop the fountain-head of this new source of current; and they reared a lofty dome, around was set a great circle charged with spiritual fire; and they drove a shaft into the rock.

One volume lays open before me now, the whispering thought-patterns impregnated into its glistening pages murmuring softly when I touch the letters. In youth, I found this book written in a language dead to everyone but me. It was this book that persuaded the lovely Hellenore (in violation of all law and wisdom) to sneak from the safety of the pyramid into the horror-haunted outer lands.

Perithoös had no choice but to follow. This very book I read slew my boyhood friend—if indeed he is dead.

Through the casement above me, the cold air blows. Some fume not entirely blocked by the Air-Clog that surrounds our pyramid stings my nose. Softly, I can hear murmurs and screams as a rout of monsters passes along a line of dark hills and crumbling ruins in the West, following the paths of lava-flows that issue from a dimly-shining tumble of burning mountains.

More softly, I can hear a voice that seems human, begging to be let in. It is not the kind of voice that one hears with the ear. I am not the only thing awake in the night.

4.

Scholars who read of the most ancient records say the world was not always as it is now. They say it was not always night, then; but what it may have been if it were not unending night, the records do not make clear.

Certain dreamers—once or twice a generation, we are born, the great dreamers whose dreams reach beyond the walls of time—tell of aeons older than the scholars tell. The dreamers say there was once a vapor overhead, from which pure water fell, and there was no master of the pump–house to ration it; they say the air was not an inky darkness whence fell voices cry.

In those days, there was in heaven, a brightness like unto a greater and a lesser lamp, and when the greater lamp was hooded, then the upper air was filled with diamonds that twinkled.

Other sources say that the inhabitants of heaven were not diamonds at all, but balls of gas, immeasurably distant, but visible through the transparent air. Still others say they were not gas, but fire. Somehow, despite all these contradictory reports, I have always believed in the days of light.

No proofs can be shown for these strange glimpses of times agone, but, when great dreamers sleep, the instruments of the Monstruwacans do not register the energies that are believed to accompany malign influence from beyond our walls. If it is madness to have faith in what the ancients knew, it is a madness natural to human kind, not a Sending meant to deceive us.

5.

As I nodded, half-awake, softly there came what seemed to be the voice of Perithoös into my sad and idle thoughts. I was called by my name.

“Telemachos, Telemachos! Undo for me the door as once I did for you; return the good deed you said you would. If vows are nothing, what is anything?”

I did not move or raise my head, but my brain elements sent this message softly out into the night, even though my lips did not move. “Perithoös, closer than a brother, I wept when I heard your company was overwhelmed by the monsters. What became of the maiden you set out to rescue?”

“Maiden no more I found her. Dead, dead, horribly dead, and by my hand. Herself and her child; and I had not the courage to join them.”

“How are you alive after all these years?”

“I cannot make the door to open.”

“Call to the gate-warden, Perithoös, and he will lower a speaking tube from a Meurtriere and you may whisper the Master-Word into it, and so prove your human soul has not been destroyed, and I will be the first to welcome you.”

The Master-Word did not come. Instead, mere words, such as any fell creature of the night could impersonate, now whispered in my brain: “Telemachos, son of Amphion! I am still human, I still remember life, but I cannot say the Master-Word.”

“You lie. That cannot be.”

And yet I felt a tear stinging in my eye, and I knew, somehow, that this voice did not lie: he was still human. But how could he forget the Word?

“Though it has never been before, in the name of the blood we shed together as boys, the gruel in which we bound our silly oath, I call on you to believe and know that a new sorrow has appeared in this old, sad world, like fresh blood from an old scar; it is possible to forget what it means to be a man, and yet remain one. I have lost the Master-Word; I have my very self. Let me through the door. I am so cold.”

I did no longer answer him, but stirred my heavy limbs.

Though my hands and feet felt like lead, I moved and trembled and slid from my desk where I slumbered, and fell to the floor heavily enough to jar myself awake.

How long I lay I do not know. My memory is dark, and perhaps time was not for me then flowing as it should have been. I remember being cold, but not having the strength to rise and shut the window; and this was a part of the library, so there were no thought-switches I could close just by wishing them closed.

My thoughts drifted with the cold wind from the window.

This wing of the library had been deserted for half a million of years. No one came into this wing, since no one could read the language, or understand the thoughts, of the long-forgotten peoples who had sent Usire out to found a new stronghold. Only I knew the real name of those ancient folk; modern antiquarians called them the Orichalcum people, because they were the only ones who knew the secret of that metal; and no other trace of them survived.

And so the Air Masters, during the last two hundred years of power-outages, had lowered the ventilation budget in this wing to a minimum. I had needed vasculum of breathing-leaf just to get in here, and would have fainted with the window shut.

Nor were failures of the ventilations rare. Most windows of most of the middle-level cities stood open, these days, no matter what the wise traditions of elder times required.

It was two miles above the Night Land. No monster could cross the White Circle, and nothing has climbed so high since the Incursions of four hundred thousand years ago; and even if they did, this window was too small to admit them.

I remembered wings. In my dreams I see doves, or the machines used by ancient men to impersonate them. But the air is thin, and even the dark and famished things have no wings to mount so high.

I thought there was no danger to have the window open. Stinging insects, vapors, or particles would be surely stopped by the Air Clog. But what if the power losses over the last few centuries were greater than is publicly admitted by the Aediles or the Castellan? But it had not stopped the Mind-Call, as it should have done.

Many Foretellers have dreamt that it is five million years before the final extinction of mankind. Most of the visions agree on certain basic elements, though much is in dispute. Five million years. We are supposed to have that long. I wondered, not for the first time, if those who say that they can see the shape of fate are wrong.

I came awake when there was a movement, a clang, behind me as the hatch swung open. Here was a Master of the Watch, clad from head to toe in full armor, and carrying in hand that terrible weapon called the Diskos.

I knew better than to wonder why a Watchman was here. He came into the chamber, his blade extending before him as he stepped, and his eyes never left me. The shaft was extended. The blade was lit and spinning. The furious noise of the weapon filled the room. Flickering shadows fled up and down the walls and bookshelves as eerie sparks snapped, and I felt the hair on my head, the little hairs on my naked arms, stir and stand up. I smelled ozone.

Without rising, I raised my hands. “I am a man! I am human!”

His voice was very deep, a rumble of gravel. “They all say that, those that talk.”

Slowly, loudly, clearly, I said the Master-Word, both aloud with reverent lips, and by sending it with my brain-elements.

It seemed so dark in the chamber when he doused his blade, but his smile of relief was bright.

6.

My youth had been a solitary one. To hold one’s ancestors in honor, and to love the lore of half-forgotten things, has never been in fashion among schoolboys. The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt. Students and apprentices (and, yes, teachers also) bestowed on me their well-practiced sneers; but when my dreams began, and ghosts of other lives came softly into my brain as I slept, then I was marked as a pariah, and was made the butt of every prank and cruelty boyish imagination could invent.

Perithoös was as popular as I was unpopular. He was an alarming boy to have as a schoolmate, for he had the gift of the Night-Hearing, and he could hear unspoken thoughts. All secrets were open to him; he knew passwords to open locked doors and cabinets, and could avoid orderlies after lights-out. He knew the answers to tests before the schoolmasters gave them, and the plays of the opposing team on the tourney field. He was good at everything, feared nothing, and anarchy and confusion spread from his wake. What was there for a schoolboy not to love?

Once, when the Head Boy and his gang had me locked in the cable-wheel closet, so that I would be absent from the feast-day assembly and gift-giving, Perithoös left the assembly (a thing forbidden by the headmaster’s rules), took a practice blade from the arm’s-locker and spun the charged blade against the closet door hinges, shattering the panel with a blast of noise.

Not just school proctors, but civic rectors and men of the Corridor Guard arrived. To use one of the Great Weapons while inside the pyramid was a grave offense; and neither one of us would admit who did it, even though they surely knew.

We both were scourged by the headmaster and given triple duty, and had porridge for our holiday feast, while the other boys dined on viands and candied peaches.

Perithoös and I ate alone in the staff commissary, our shirts off (so that our backs would heal) and shivering in the cold of the unheated room. We were not allowed to speak, but I tipped my bowl onto the board and wrote in the porridge letters from the set-speech: shed blood makes us brothers–I shall return this deed.

Even at that age, he was taller than the other lads, broad of shoulder and quick of eye and hand, the victor of every sport and contest, the darling of those who wagered on gymnastics games. He was as well-liked as I was ill-liked. So I expected to see doubt, or, worse, a look of patronizing kindness in his eye.

But he merely nodded, wiped away the porridge-stain with his hand quickly, so that the proctor would not see the message. Under the table, with perfect seriousness, he clasped my hand with his, and we shook on it. Porridge dripped through our fingers, but, nonetheless, that handclasp was sacred, and he and I were friends.

At that time, neither one of us knew Hellenore of High Aerie.

7.

I was found, stunned, in the library by proctors of the Watch, whose instruments had detected the aetheric disturbance sent by the voice in the Night.

The Monstruwacans kept me for a time as a guest in their tower, and I drank their potions, and held the sensitive grips of their machines, while they muttered in their white beards and looked doubtful. More than once I slept beneath their oneirometers, or was examined inch by inch by a physician’s glass.

I told them many times of my mind-speech with Perithoös, and they did not look pleased; but the physician’s glass said my soul was without taint, and my nervous system seemed sound, and besides, both the Archivist (the head of my guild) and the Master of Architects (the head of my father’s) sent letters urging my release, or else demanding that an inquest be convened at once.

I spent the remainder of my convalescence in Darklairstead, my father’s mansions on level Fourscore-and-Five. Ever since, a generation ago, the power failed along this stretch of corridor, (half the country receiving from the sub-station at Bountigrace is dark), it has been a quiet and restful place.

8.

Among my very earliest memories was one dream, repeated so many times in my childhood that I filled a whole diary with scrawled word and clumsy sketches trying to capture what I saw.

When I was seven years, my mother died, and her shining coffin was lowered into the silvery rays of the Great Chasm. My father became strange and cold. He sent my brother Arion to prentice with the Structural Stress Masters. Tmelos, (who is younger than me), was sent to the quarters of my Aunt Elegia, in Forecourtshire, for her to raise. Patricia took holy orders, and Phthia stayed with Father to run the house and rule the servants. Me, I was sent to board at a school in Longnorthhall of Floor 601, where the landing of the Boreal Stair reaches for many shining marble acres under lamps of the elder days, and potted Redwoods grow. When I left home for school, the dream left me.

As I recovered at my father’s manse, the dream came once again, and it no longer frightened me, for nothing that reminds one of childhood, even ill things, can be utterly without a certain charm.

It was a dream of doors.

I saw tall doors made of a substance that gleamed like bronze and red gold (which I later found to be a metal called Orichalcum, an alloy made by a secret only the ancients knew). The doors were carven with many strange scenes of things that had been and things that would be.

In the dream I would be terrified that they would open.

9.

Father and I would dine alone, without servants. The dining chamber is a pillared hall, wide and gloomy. Out of the hatch window, I would often see, across the air shaft from me, little candles dancing in the hatches of some of my neighbors. Once, candles had been used only for the most solemn ceremonies, back when the ancient rules against open flames in the pyramid had been enforced: the sight of candles used as candles always saddened me.

Some nights there was a hint of music from some city far overhead, echoing down the shaft, and, once, the hiss of a bat-winged machine carrying a courier-boy, (only boys are small enough), down the airshaft on some business of the Life Support House, or perhaps the Castellan, too urgent to wait for the lifts.

Our table was made from a tree felled down in the underground country, by a craftsman whose art is the cutting and jointing of living material, an art called Carpentry. Such is Father’s prestige he can have such things brought up the lifts for him, but he has never moved the family to better quarters.

My father is a big, tall man, with fierce, penetrating eyes in an otherwise very mild face. He shaves his chin, but has a moustache that bristles, and this gives his penetrating eyes a strange and savage look.

I have dreamed of other lives, and once, in a prehistoric world, a dusky savage who was me, strong and lean of limb, and braver than I ever hoped to be, died beneath the claws of a tiger. The great cat was more bright of hue than anything in our world is, shining orange and black as it slunk through dripping jungles beneath a sun as hot as the muzzle of a culverin. I wonder what became of that species, that lived on some continent long since swallowed by the seas, before the seas dried up, before the sun died. I have always thought that extinct beast looked something like my father.

His bald head was growing back in new hair, as sometimes happens to men of his order, for men who work near the Earth-Current, their vitality is greater than normal.

After dinner, we brought out carafes of water and wine, which glistened in the candlelight, and mixed them in our bowls. I am sparing with the wine and he is sparing of the water, but he is sober even when he drinks deep and shows no levity nor thickwittedness. Perhaps exposure to the Earth-Current helps here too.

He sat with his bowl in his hand, staring out the air-shaft. He spoke without turning his head. “You know the tale of Andros and Naäni. You were raised on it. I am sure I hate it as much as you adore it.”

I said, “Andrew Eddins of Kent, and Christina Lynn Mirdath the Beautiful. The tale shows that, even in a world as dark as ours, there is light.”

Father shook his head. “False light. Will-o’-Wisp light! I do not blame the hero for his deeds. They were great, and he was a mighty man, high-hearted and without vice. But the hope he brought served us ill. Perithoös was no Andros, go into the Night. And that high-born girl who toyed with your affections; Hellenore. She was no Mirdath the Beautiful. Hellenore the Vain, I should call her.”

“Please speak no ill of the dead, father. They cannot answer you.”

He raised his bowl with a graceful gesture and took a silent sip, and paused to admire the taste. “Hm. Neither can they hear me, and so they will not flinch. She is not the first of the dead who have served the living poorly. He did us ill, whichever forefather first thought it would be wise to leave us tales and songs that tell young boys to go be brave and die, or to perish for a gesture.”

I said, “Keeping a promise counts for more than mere gesture, Father.”

“Does keeping a promise count more than preserving flesh or soul?”

I said, “Those who study such matters say that souls are born again in later ages, even if the conscious memories are lost; poets claim that oath-breakers are reborn into lives accursed with turmoil and bitter anguish. If so, then each man in his present life must take care to die spotlessly, his soul still pure.”

Father smiled bitterly. He did not read poets. “What point is the punishment, if, in his next life, each criminal has forgotten what crime he did?”

I said, “So that even men who are stoical and hard in this life will fear to break their word; for, in their next, they will be young and green again; and suffering that comes unannounced, for reasons that seem reasonless, are surely the hardest pains of all to bear.”

“A pretty tale. Must you die for an idle fiction?”

“Sir, it is not a fiction.”

He said: “Must you die, fiction or not?”

“I had no other friend in my school days.”

“Perithoös was no true friend!”

“And yet I gave my word to him, friend or not. Now I am called to fulfill it.”

“Who calls? There are Powers in the dark who can mock our voices and our thoughts, and deceive even the wisest of us. Only the Master-Word is one the Horrors cannot utter, for it represents a concept that they cannot understand, an essence that does not dwell in them. If what called to you did not call out the Master-Word, you know our law commands you not to heed it.”

I answered: “Despite the law, despite all wisdom, still, a hope possesses me that he is alive, and undestroyed, somehow.”

He said grimly: “A true man would not call out to you.”

I did not know if he meant that a man of honor would die before he let himself be used to lure a friend out into the darkness; or if he meant that what called out to me had not been human at all. Perhaps both.

I said: “What sort of man would I be, if it truly were Perithoös calling, and I did not answer?”

He said: “It is your death calling.”

And I had no answer back for that. I knew it was so.

After a space of silence, eventually he spoke again: “Do you see any cause for hope you say has taken possession of you?”

“I see no cause.”

“But–?”

“But hope fills me up, father, nonetheless, and it burns in my heart like a lamp, and makes my limbs light. There are many ugly things we do not see in this dark land that surrounds us, father, horrors unseen. And there are said to be good powers as well, whose strange benevolence works wonders, though never in a way humans can know. And they also are not seen, or only rarely. There are many things, which, although unseen, are real. More real than the imperishable metal of our pyramid, more potent that the living power of the Earth-Current. More real than fire. So, I admit, I see no cause for hope. And yet it fills me.”

He was silent for a while, and puffed his pipe. He is a rational man, who solved problems by means of square and chisel, stone and steel, measured currents of energy, knowing the strengths of structures and what load each support can bear. I knew my words meant little to him.

He reached his hand and doused the lantern, so that I could not see the pain in his face. He voice hovered in the dark, and he tried to make his words cold: “I will not forbid you to venture into the Night Lands…”

“Thank you, Father.”

“…. Since I have other sons to carry on my name.”

10.

Visions, pulmenoscopy, and extra-temporal manifestations are not unknown to the people of the Last Redoubt. The greatest among us are known to have the Gift; and at least one of the Lesser Redoubt also was endowed with the Night-Hearing, and memory-dreams.

Mirdath the Beautiful is the only woman known to have crossed the Night Lands, and her nine scrolls of the histories and customs of the Lesser Redoubt are the only record of any kind we have for the history, literature, folkways and sciences of that long-lost race of mankind. All the mathematical theories of Galois we know only from her memory; the plays of Euryphaean, and the music of an instrument called a pianoforte, infinite resistance coil and the sanity glass, and all the inventions that sprang from them, are due to her recollection. Her people were a frugal folk, and the energy-saving circuits they used, the methods of storing battery power, were known to them a million years ago, and greatly conserved our wealth. Much of what she knew of farming and crops we could not use, for the livestock and seed of our buried fields were strange to her.

She knew more of the lost aeons than even Andros, and was able to tell tales from the time of the Cities Ever Moving West, of the Painted Bird, and of the Gardens of the Moon; she knew something of the Failures of the Star-Farers, and of the Sundering of the Earth.

More, she also had the gift of the Foretelling, for some of the dreams she had were not of the past, but of the future, and she wrote of the things to come, the Darkening, the False Reprieve, the disaster of the Diaspora into the Land of Water and Fire, the collapse of the Gate beneath the paw of the South Watching Thing, the years of misery and the death of man, beyond which is a time from which no dreams return, although there is said to be a screaming in the aether, dimly heard through the doors of time, the time-echo of some event after the destruction of all human life. All these things are set out in the Great Book, and for this reason Mirdath is also called The Predictress.

Mirdath and Andros had fifty sons and daughters, and all the folk of High Aerie claim descent from them, some truly, and some not.

Hellenore of High Aerie was one of those who made that claim truly.

11.

When I was a young man, a time came when my future had disturbed those whose business it is to seek foreknowledge from dreams, and I was summoned to an audience.

For many generations the Foretelling art had fallen into disrepute, and charlatans rose to deceive the common people; but then a girl of the blood of Mirdath was born whose gift was proven by many sad events, the Library of Ages-Yet-To-Be was reopened. The Sibylline Book had more treatises of prophecy added to it, and eschatologists compared dream-journals and revised their estimates. Even I had heard of her: the hour-slips said she was sure to be the next Sibyl.

I don’t recall the date. It must have been soon after my Initiation, for I wore my virile robe, and my hair was cropped short as befits a man. The blade that was ever after to be partnered with my life, I had hung over the narrow door to my cell in the journeyman’s room of the Librarian’s Guild-house, as only those beyond their fourteenth year are permitted. I remember that the squire to come fetch me called me ‘Sir’ instead of ‘Lad’, even though he (to my young eyes) seemed incredibly old.

I remember the Earth-Current was running strong that year. It was my first time at the Great Lift Station for my floor. Invisible forces lifted the platform in a great surge of wind off the deck. Maidens clutched their bonnets and squealed, and many a young gallant (for a strong flow of the Earth-Current makes lads more bold and amorous) took the opportunity to put an arm around fair shoulders to steady a maiden making her first voyage away from her level. Some of the more daring boys leaned over the rail, and waved their caps at the rapidly dwindling squares and rooftops of the city, before, like an iron sky, the underside of the next deck upwards swallowed the lift platform. I rode the axial express all the way to the utmost level. I remember I had to drink a potion made by the apothecary, because of the thinness of the air.

Fate House sits atop the highest stories of the highest city; the hanging gardens of High Aerie sit between the shining skylights of West Cupola and the pleasances and airy walks of Minor Penthouse. There are floral gardens here, under glass, as well as pools and lakes amid the rooftop-fields of the long-empty aerodromes built by ancient peoples.

The domes of Fate House are dusky blue, inscribed with gold, and, above the roof-tiles, many a monument of ancient hero or winged genius of the household stood on slender pillars among the minarets. All within was somber and august as a fane.

Here was Hellenore daughter of Eris. I see again the sheen of her satiny dress, as she sat beneath the rose lamp on a Lector’s chair too large for her delicate frame. How like a swan’s, her neck, all her mass of ink-black hair was gathered up and held in place with amethyst pins, jewel-drops like the stars the ancients knew, within the clear darkness of their temporary nights. I recall the delicate small hairs, wanton and wild, that had strayed from the strictness of her coiffure, and kissed the nape of her neck.

None of our pyramid has eyes like that, hair like that, save those descended from the strange blood of Mirdath the Beautiful. And none but me remembered the grace of the swan, and so none but me could see it in her.

Her voice was soft music, each word careful and light, like a brushstroke of calligraphy laid in the air. With what delicate tones she spoke of the grim horrors in the night, the grim future she foresaw nightly in her dreams!

We spoke for a time, of the horrors of the Deception two million years hence (slightly less than half way between now and the Extinction), when colonies of man leaving the Great Pyramid would go to dwell in what seemed a fair country to the West, even as certain legends said, not knowing that the House of Silence had already cursed and undermined the whole of that land, and merely held their influence at bay for millennia, waiting for the memory of these prophecies of Hellenore to be forgotten. Whole cities, pyramids and domes as great as ours, would be swallowed and cracked open, and multitudes would die, one entire branch of the human family wiped out; the survivors to be changed into something not human.

Then we spoke of my fate.

“My visions revealed hundreds shall die because of some ill-considered act you set in motion; first one, then many more, will go pelting out into the darkened world to perish amid the ice, or be ripped to bloody rags by Night-Hounds, to be sucked clean of their souls and left as husks, grinning mouths and eyes as dry as stones. Heed me! I see many prints of boots across the icy dust of the Night Land, leading outward from our gates; I see but one set coming in.”

I asked: “Must these things come to pass?”

“No human power can alter what must be.”

“And powers more than human?”

She said softly: “We foreseers behold the structure of time; there are creatures not quite wholly inside of time, powers of the Night Land, whose malice we cannot foretell, since they are above and alien to the rules of time and space that bind all mortal life; there are said to be good powers, too.”

“A riddle! Man’s fate can be changed, but men cannot change fate.” I asked.

Her full lips toyed with a smile, but she did not allow the smile to appear. “We are but drops in a river, young man,” she said, “No matter what one drop might wish or do, the river course is set, and all waters glide to the ocean.”

These words electrified me. “Ah!” I said, forgetting my manners, jumping up and taking her hand. “Then you have seen them too! Rivers and oceans! In visions, I have seen and heard the waters flowing, ebbing, pulled by tides, crashing by the shore. There is no sound alike it in the world, now.”

She was startled and displeased, and favored me with a look of ice as she drew her fair and slender hand from mine. “Strange boy—what is your name again?—I spoke a line from old poetry. My people in the high-most towers are learned in such lore, and know old words like river and sea; but no one has seen them, except in the decorations of volumes none can read.”

I did not say that there was one who could read what others had forgotten. I spoke stiffly, “My apologies, high born one. Your comment thrilled my heart, for I had thought you meant to say that we would do great deeds in times to come, to defy that ocean that must swallow up human lore and history, so that the watercourse down which the current takes us might be ripped free of its bed, and set to a new path.”

“Strange boy! What strange things you say!” She recoiled, one slim hand on her soft bosom, her lovely long-lashed eyes looking at me askance. Even in surprise, even when showing disdain, how elegant her every gesture!

“There was a time when all men spoke thus, and did deeds to match.”

“Only men?” But she was not looking at me. Her eyes were turned sideways, and she stared at some spot on the walls of her family’s presence chamber. There were many busts, portraits, and engraved tablets along the walls—I don’t know which ancestor her gaze was resting on. In hindsight, it surely was Mirdath.

I said, “Can you tell me what this ill-considered act might be?”

Her eyes were elsewhere; she spoke airily, unheeding: “Oh, some chance remark spoken to some girl you fall in love with.”

My voice was hollow, and my stomach was empty. “What? Must I vow to be silent, to speak never more to any woman?” It took me a moment to rally my courage. I drew a breath, and spoke. “If that is my doom, I will learn to welcome it. If I must, I will take the vow, and go to some monastery in the buried basements, forbidden to woman, that I might never meet my love.”

Her glittering eyes returned to me, and now a girlish mischief was in them. She said archly: “You will defy the structures of time and destiny, and rip up the pillars of the laws of nature, but you will meekly foreswear love and speech, merely because you are ordered to it? Backward boy! You would challenge what we cannot change, but would submit to what we can!”

That made me smile. “Perithoös says the same thing of me. Always looking backwards! We were walking at the Embrasures, and he joked once that–”

Hellenore sat upright, eyes shining. She said, “You know Perithoös, the athlete? What hour does he stroll upon the balcony, what level, where?”

A glow of joy lived in her face; and then she blushed and my heart ached with pleasure to see her cheek glow; but the thought of meeting Perithoös was such that she could not put away her smile, so she lifted her slender hand to hide it. If you have seen young maidens in the grip of first love, you know the sight; if not, my poor pen cannot mark it.

I told her I would arrange a meeting, and the smile came out again.

Beautiful, was that smile; though not for me.

And yet so lovely!

They met, at first, with chaperones.

At first. One of them could see the future and the other could see thoughts; both were bold, nobly born, and love-drunk. How was a duenna to keep them under watch?

12.

They died swiftly, those who died, when the three hundred suitors set out to rescue Hellenore.

The company had been divided into three columns of one hundred men each. Before five-and-twenty hours of march, the rearguard column had driven off a host of troll-things from the ice hills, and stopped to rest and tend their wounds. From the balconies, and from the viewing tables, we watched them make a camp. It was hard to see, for it was well camouflaged; the tents and palisade were mere shadows among shadows, even under the most powerful magnification; and the sentries at the picket moved without making noise, warily.

But then they did not stir again. Either a sending from the House of Silence, or an invisible fume leaking from the ground, made the sleepers not to wake. Long-range telescopes glimpsed the survivors, perhaps the sentries who did not lay down, trying to carry one or two men to higher ground. The rest were left behind. A pallid slug a thousand feet long oozed into view near the last known position of those men; the Monstruwacan instruments recorded tiny Earth-Current discharges at about that same time, so it was thought that the survivors swung their weapons once or twice before they died.

At about seventy hours, the main column was beset by the Great Gray Hag, mate of the monster slain by Andros, and her fleshy fingers pushed men into the sagging hole that formed her maw, armor and all. The column was routed, and fled into the Deathly Shining Lands to escape her. They did not emerge. The Shine is opaque, and nothing has been seen again of those men. The scouts accompanying the main column were eaten by Night-Hounds, one by one.

The vanguard column lasted until the end of the second week, when the Bell of Darkness descended from the cloud, and tolled its dire toll. Only seven out of those hundred had the presence of mind, or strength of will, to bare their forearms and bite down on the Capsule of Release. Those whose nerve failed them, and who did not slay themselves in time, were drawn silently up into the air, their eyes all empty, and strange little vulgar grins upon their lips, and their bodies floated upward into the mouth of the Bell.

We all watched from the balconies. I heard from underfoot, like an ocean, the sound of mothers and wives weeping, men shouting, children crying, and the noise was like the oceans of the ancient world, but all of grief.

The shattering noise of the Home-call echoing from the upper cities interrupted, ordering all the millions to shut their windows; and lesser horns were sounded on the balconies to pass the warning to the lower cities. The watchmen ordered the Blinds raised up on their great pistons to block the windows and embrasures of every city and hamlet dug into the northeastern side of the pyramid; and the towers and dormer windows lowered their armor.

I remember hearing, before the Blinds closed over us, the whispering murmur of the air-clog, straining under double power, raising an unseen curtain to deflect the malice of the tolling bell, lest the sound of it drive mad the multitudes.

Perithoös had been in the vanguard. The Monstruwacans studied blurry prints made from long-range telescopes, and tried to confirm each death, what little comfort that might have been to the grieving families. Not every corpse was accounted for.

My cousin Thaïs came to see me while I was undergoing Preparation. She is pretty and curt, with a sly sense of humor and a good head for chess and math. Thaïs did not, aloud, try to argue me out of my venture, but she showed me her calculation: The expected average lifespan of men who went forth to save Hellenore worked out to an hour, twelve minutes.

13.

By traditions so ancient that no record now recalls a time when they were not, those who venture into the Night Land do not carry lamps. It is too well known, too long confirmed by experience, that a traveler cannot resist the temptation to light such lamps, when the darkness has starved his eyes for too many fortnights.

And so it is thought, that since the weapons we carry give off light when they are spun, that those who walk in the Night will have light when and only when it is needful: that is, namely, when one of the monstrosities is no further off from us than a yard or two; for then we must strike, we must see to make the stroke.

Our craftsman could make lamps to burn a million years or more. We will not carry them into the Dark. A man who will not trust his soul to warn him of unseen dangers coming silently upon him, is the only kind who needs a lantern in the Night. But would such a man, too unsure to trust his soul, be man enough to beat back all the horrors his lantern would attract?

We carry also a dial of the type that can be read by touch, for to lose track of hours, and proper times for rest and sup, is to court madness.

There is a scrip for toting the tablets, made of solidified vital nutrients, which is the traveler’s sole food—for there is nothing wholesome in the Night Lands to eat—more solid food, even a bite from an apple, might bring too much belly-cheer and relax the discipline of the Preparation.

Likewise, water is condensed out of the atmosphere in a special cup by a powder made by the Chemist’s guild. The new-water is pure and clear, but bitterly cold, and the cup has that virtue that anything placed in it is cleansed of venom or morbific animacules. Some travelers hold the cup over mouth and nose when treading lands were the air is bad.

The mantle is woven of a fiber that, though it is not alive, is wise enough to shed heat more or less as the deadliness of the chill grows more or less, depending on the amount of heat escaping from the ground.

The armor is so stern, and made so cunningly, that even monsters many times the strength of a man cannot dint it, and the joints are fitted at a level too fine for the eye to see. A blessing in the metal, an energy not unlike what throbs so purely in the fires of the White Circle, is impregnated into the helm and breastplate, to help slow those particular influences that attack the brain and freeze the heart.

Arms, armor, mantle, are made by craft a million years has perfected; and they are fair to the eye, but grim and without ornament, as befits the sobriety of the undertaking.

14.

At last the torment of the Preparation Chambers ended. I was oddly clear-headed after the fasting and the injections, and I had endured the test of being forced to view that which still lives, pinned to a slab and sobbing, within the refrigerated cell at the center of the secret museum of the Monstruwacans. I had read the bestiaries of former travelers returned sane from outer voyaging, and learnt what they said of the ways and habits of the night-beasts; and I understood why such journals are not shown to any save those whose quest carries them outside our walls.

The Capsule of Release still ached within the tender flesh of my forearm; and the hour of parting was come.

The lamps of the Final Stair were darkened. The watchmen, armed with living blades and armored in imperishable gray metal, stood for a time in silence, composing their thoughts, so that no disturbance in the aether, no stray gleam of thought or metal or sudden noise, would tell the waiting horrors of the night lands that a child of man had strayed among their cold hills.

I stood with my face pressed to the periscope for many minutes, and the escort with me showed no impatience, for they knew it was my life I staked at hazard on my judgment of the ground.

At last I raised my hand.

The Master of the Gatehouse saluted me with his dark Diskos, and the door-tender closed the switch that sent power to the valves. The metal leaves of the inner gate swung shut behind me, and then the outer leaves swung open, very swiftly and silently.

Out I stepped. The ashy soil crunched beneath my boot. The air was as chill as death. The outer valve was already shut behind me, and two layers of armor heavily closed back over it, locking pistons clicking shut almost without noise. If a monster were to lunge across the Circle from the all-surrounding darkness, or a Presence to manifest itself, the door wardens were obliged to do nothing but guard the door. I was already beyond rescue.

None within would come out for me, as I was now going out for Perithoös, and he had gone out for his fair Hellenore. Prudent men, they all.

15.

A few minutes' walk—no more than half a mile—I crossed the place where a hollow tube of transparent metal, charged with holy white energies, makes a circle around the vast base of the pyramid. It is held to be one of the greatest artifacts of ancient times, the one thing that keeps all the malefic pressures, the eerie calls and poisonous clouds and groping fingers of subtle force at bay. The hollow tube is two inches in diameter, hardly higher than my boot-top. It only took a single step to cross it, but I must clear my mind of all distempered thought before the unseen curtain would part for me. My ears popped with the change in pressure.

It is customary not to look back when one steps across the line of light. I was inclined to follow the custom.

My father had not been present to see me off.

16.

We who live within this mountain-sized fortress of a million windows of shining light, we cannot see, where flat high rocky plains lift their faces into our light, the long dark shadows cast by the rocks and hillocks and moss-bushes radiating away from the pyramid; darkness that never moves, straight and level as if drawn by a ruler. Even the smallest rock has a train of shadow trailing away from it, reaching out into the general night, so that, looking left and right, the traveler sees what seem to be a hundred hundred long fingers of gloom, all pointing straight toward the Last Redoubt of Man.

But no traveler is unwise enough to step into such a high plain lit so well. The bottom mile of the pyramid is darkened, her base-level cities long abandoned, and the lower windows covered over with armor plate. A skirt, as it were, of shadow surrounded the base of the pyramid, and one must travel away from the pyramid to expose oneself to the shining of the many windows of the Last Redoubt; even before leaving the protection of the skirt of shadow, there are many places where the ground has been tormented into crooked dells and ragged shapes, dry canyons, or deep scars from the ancient glaciers or the far more ancient weapons of prehistory. Such broken ground I sought.

I entered the canyons to the west within the first two hours of traveling, and encountered no beasts, no forces of horror.

My way was blocked by a river of boiling mud shown on none of our maps. The telescopes and viewing tables of our pyramid had never noted it, despite that it was so close to us, for ash floated in a layer atop the mud-flow, and was the same hue as the ground itself. It was not visible to me until my foot broke the sticky surface and I scalded my foot. Perhaps it was newly erupted from some fire-hole or perhaps it had been here for centuries. We know so little.

This mud river drove me south and curving around the side of the pyramid, and I marched thirty hours and three. I ate twice of the tablets, and slept once, finding a warm space behind a tall rock where heat and some uncouth vapor escaped from a rent in the ground.

Before I slept, I probed the sand near the rent with the hilt of my Diskos, and a little serpent, no more than an ell in length, reared up. It was a blind albino worm, of the kind called the amphisbaena, for its tail had a scorpion’s stinger. I slew it with a fire-glittering stroke from my roaring weapon, and the heavy blade passed through the worm as it were made of air, and the halves were flung smoking to either side. It was with great contentment I slept, deeming myself to be a mighty hero and a slayer of monsters.

17.

The encampment and stronghold of Usire, I knew from my books, and from my memory-dreams, lay to the north by north west beyond the shoulders and back of the Northwest Watching Thing. There are other watchers more dreadful, but none is more alert, for the ground to the Northwest is wide and flat in prospect, and it is lit by the Vale of Red Fire; and there is neither a crown nor eye-beam nor wide dome of light to interfere with the view the monster commands.

To go to the country beyond the creature, my way must go far around, for the North way was too well watched. To my West was the Pit of Red Smoke itself, a land of boiling chasms and lakes of fire, impassible. To the East of me, I could see the silhouette of the Gray Dunes: and here was a sunken country populated by thin and stilt-legged creatures, much in shape like featherless birds, and they carried iron hooks, and they were very careful never to expose themselves to the windows of the pyramid as they stirred and crawled from pit to pit. The canyon walls were riddled with black doorways, from whence, now and again, the Wailing which gives the Place of Wailing its name would rise, and the bird-things would caper silently and flourish their hooks. To the east I would not go.

I went South.

Each time I rose after snatched sleep, the shapes of two of the Great Watching Things, malign and silent, were closer and clearer to my gaze.

First, to my right, rising, vast and motionless, the Thing of the Southwest was but a dim silhouette, larger than a hill. It was alive, but not as we know life. There was a crack in the ground at its feet, from which a beam of light rose, to illume part of that monstrous cheek, and cast shadows across its lowering brow. Its bright left eye hung in the blackness, slit-pupilled and covered with red veins, seemingly as big as the Full Moon that once hung above a world whose nights came and went.

Some say this eye is blinded by the beam, and that the beam was sent by Good Forces to preserve us. Others say the beam assists the eye to cast its baleful influence upon us, for it is noted by those whose business it is to study nightmares, that this great cat-like eye appears more often in our dreams than any other image of the Night Lands.

I remember my mother telling me once, how a time came when that great eye, over a period of weeks, was seen to close; and a great celebration was held in the many cities of the pyramid, and they celebrated for a reason they knew not why. They knew only that the eye had never before been known to close. But the lid was not to stay closed forever and aye; in eleven year’s time, a crack had appeared between the upper and nether lid, for the monster was only blinking a blink. Each year the crack widened. By the time I was born, the eye was fully opened, and so it had been all of my life.

Second, to my left was the great Watching Thing of the South, which is larger and younger than the other Watching Things, being only some three million years ago that it emerged from the darkness of the unexplored southern lands, advancing several inches a decade, and it passed over the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk between twenty-five and twenty-four hundred thousand years ago.

Then, suddenly, some twenty-two hundred thousand years ago, before its mighty paws, there opened a rent in the ground, from which a pearl or bubble of pure white light rose into view. Over many centuries the pearl grew to form a great smooth dome some half a mile broad. The Watching Thing of the South placed its paw on the dome, and it rises no further, but neither has the Watching Thing advanced across that mighty dome of light in all these years.

It is known from prophecy that this is the Watcher who will break open the doors of the Pyramid with one stroke of its paw, some four and a half million years from now, but that the death of all mankind will be prevented for another half million years by a pale and slender strand of white light that will emerge from the ground at the very threshold of the great gates. More than this, the dreams of the future do not tell.

Between the Watching Thing of the South and of the South-West, the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk runs across a dark land. The Road was broad, and could not be crossed except in the full view of the Watching Things to the South and the South-West. But the ground on the far side of the Road is dim, lit by few fire-pits, and coated with rubble and drifts of black snow, where a man could hide.

In this direction was my only hope. Suppose that the eye-beam does indeed blind the right eye of the Watching Thing of the South-West, and suppose again that the dome of light troubles the vision of the Great Watcher of the South more than the Monstruwacans have guessed: I could cross the Great Road on the blind side of the South-West monster, and sneak between him and his brother, perhaps to hide among the black snowdrifts beyond. I would then follow the road as it wound past the place of the abhumans, and then leave the road and venture north, into the unknown country called the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill.

18.

Weeks of darkness passed. It is not just for food and drink and warmth I hungered, but also for light, for rest, for a place to set my heavy weapon down and never to see it again (and yet I never put it from my hand; not to eat, not to drink, not to evacuate my bowels, and certainly not to sleep).

I yearned for salve to sooth my feet where my boots, perfectly fitted when I was hale, fit me but ill, now that my flesh had shrunk from hunger and cold, and chafed me.

I yearned for clear, warm water with which to wash my eyes of the grit and tears that had frozen there, tiny icicles on my lashes. The smoke-holes I had to approach to stay warm enough to live would choke me, and make my eyes water; and I dare not cough, for fear of what might hear me; I could not wipe my eyes with the icy-cold metal of my gauntlet, and I dared not take my gauntlets off, because this needs both hands, and to put my weapon down, even for a moment, I had been trained not to do. So I would weep when gritty sulfur fumes would blow into my face, and I would look at my supply of water-generating powder, and know that I had not enough to last for drinking as it was.

But laying down to sleep on the cold ground was the worst part of it.

For I was afraid.

I was afraid to put my back to the ground; and afraid to close my eyes, even though, in the gloom of the Night Lands, my open eyes showed me little more than deceptive plumes of flame erupting from distant earth-cracks, or wavering little light, like St. Elmo’s Fire, that sizzled from peak to peak of glassy crater-pocked hilltops, or the blotchy shine seeping from soil deadly to tread upon. It was not merely the monsters that I feared, though Night-Hounds and giant slug-things were terrible enough, it was the Powers for which we have no names.

I could sense them moving through the upper air, or running like buried streams through the ground underfoot, ancient, malignant, and terrible. At times they whispered to each other, and I could hear them in my heart, though I could not make out words.

Their hatred for mankind, their terrible hunger, beat in the air like a drum, like the pressure of a storm about to break; and I could sense their malice moving across the night land, creeping from hill to valley, from crater to lava-bed, from glacier to fire-pit, restless, inhuman, extraterrestrial, infinite.

19.

As I passed through the diseased land of the Abhumans, crawling from ditch to ditch, and hiding in the ash of cold crater-mouths, I saw the race destined to replace us, walking on their back paws with large steps across a land the dark powers had given them: stoop-shouldered, crooked-legged men with powerful chests, arms as thick as my leg. Their nails were black like iron, and their hairy pelts were thick and coarse, like the pelts of shaggy wolves from a former age; their mouths were like the muzzles of baboons, with canines keener than my dirk. They had no tool more complex than the thighbone of a Night-Hound, that they used for truncheons; and their dams and their spratlings were equally unlovely.

But it was not their crudeness that repelled me; it was the wisdom in their eyes, their wolf-eyes glowing green beneath thick brow ridges. I saw in their expressions a cruelty, a haunting and solemn cruelty, humans are not prone to know.

As I passed through their lands, they grew aware of me, and hunted me.

With the abhumans on my trail, I was driven east, back toward the Pit of Red Smoke. I entered the rocky and broken terrain surrounding the lip of the Pit of Red Smoke, a land of cliff and standing stones. The land here was tormented, as if giants with axes had split the ground and flung huge boulders each every way (though our records show no trace that the giants had ever done such a thing, here); and often I came across rows of pillars and the rubble where walls had been.

Over several watches the abhumans hunted me, and I needed to rely upon my memory of the maps I had studied in the House of the Monstruwacans of this bit of terrain, so that a retreat down some promising canyon would not turn into a cul-de-sac, and death. When the Pit of Red Smoke was belching opaque clouds, and the land was dark, I moved; when the Pit was calm, and red shine hung on the bellies of low clouds, and red shadows fell across the stark rocks of the land, I hid. At such times, I could see the Last Redoubt, shining and beautiful in the distance. But, nearer at hand, I saw the Lesser Dome of Too Many Doors, windowless and crusted with pentagonal cracks as if it had been the shell of a monstrous tortoise; and, also I saw, to one side and beyond it, the lowering profile of the Northwest Watching thing.

Once I woke to hear stealthy noises in dark to one side of me; I fled the other way, as quickly as silence allowed, and, in the dark, climbed a cliff, with nothing to guide me but touch to find the handholds and toeholds across the icy rock. I had to draw off my gauntlets to do it, because the fingers of the gauntlet were too clumsy for this work; but the stone soon sucked all the heat and feeling out of my fingers; with numb hands, I could not feel where the stone was, and, in the dark, the rocky cliff seemed to no longer be vertical.

I heard sniffing noises underfoot, and caught the odor of abhumans thick in the air.

All at once, blinding me, a flare from the Pit of Red Smoke rose up, and I could see the cliff; I was but a little yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks. The light was splashing against the height where I was, but the canyon I had just crawled from was black to my eyes, though I heard a low sardonic mutter of abhumans speaking to each other when I became visible. For some reason, it chilled me to hear them, so calm, so self-controlled, when they spotted me; I did not know what words they said, but their tones were dry and remote.

When I crested the brink, I heard a low, mocking laugh coming from my left. Here, out from the shadow of a tall rock, and into the leaping red light, came three hunched figures. Apelike, they moved on feet and knuckles, carrying their truncheons in their teeth, but they each grasped their truncheons in one or both forepaws, and rose to their back feet when they rushed toward me, and they smiled grimly as they came. The stench from their powerful arms was terrible.

I drew the Diskos, and felt the power in the haft enter my hands and warm them; the flare of light, the terrible roar of the spinning blade, caused the foremost abhuman to hesitate; I slashed him across the belly, and lighting threw his guts unwinding from the ghastly wound; and his body jumped a yard into the air from the electric shock, arms and legs jerking; the other two closed in on either side of me, and aimed truncheon-blows at my legs and head.

One blow struck my leg-armor, which rang like a bell; and I fell, so the other blow passed my helmet, and struck the rock to one side of me with such force, the rock splintered and flew in pieces.

At that same moment in time, the flare from the red pit ended, and black smoke smothered all the light. The Diskos, either by chance, or because of its own wiliness, ceased to spin and roar, so the blade went dark; and the hulking mass of the abhuman I felt move near above me in the sudden dark.

Awkwardly I rolled to one side. Something in my motion startled the abhuman stooping over me. I heard his truncheon whistle through the air, I felt rock splinters from his superhuman blow thrown ringing, against my armor. But he must have lost his footing in the dark, for there was a slither of pebbles, and rush of air, and, with a low, ironic mutter like a curse, I heard the great beast-man fall. There were hisses from down below in the canyon, low words suggestive of irony and contempt, and perhaps a scoffing laugh or two, when the body fell among those gathered there.

I rose to my feet and lit my weapon. The beast-man stepped back. Now there was no light from the red pit; the only light here was the flare from my blade. With a gesture of distaste, the beast-man put one paw before his wolfish eyes and stepped back.

He hefted his club and measured the distance between us with his eyes. He saw that he had reach, and a more powerful blow than I did, but the mere touch of my weapon would make his muscles jerk.

At that moment, I heard a murmur like the roar of the sea. To my left, miles away, the Last Redoubt was visible, balcony upon balcony shining, a wall of light. People had been watching my duel. When I had first lit my weapon and struck at the first abhuman, men, women, and children standing in the pyramid windows, or over their telescopes, must have cried out. Perhaps only a gasp, of a word of hope, but, amplified by a million voices, it became a strong noise on the wind of the world; only now had that cry reached me.

How that sound filled my heart! I saw doubt twisted the sneering muzzle of the abhuman; his eyes were troubled with sorrow and regret.

While he paused, I snapped my Diskos-shaft out to its full length, and performed a running lunge called a flèche; The monster raised his heavy bone club to parry, but it is no easy matter to parry a spinning disk; my blade skipped off and around his parry and smote his wrist.

It would have been a minor wound, had my weapon been a minor weapon, for the cut itself was not deep; but the power and shock of the Earth-Current shining from my blade entered his wound and made his limbs jerk and jump. Before he could recover, I drew my dirk with my off hand, and struck into his great hairy chest at the spot where my trainers told me the heart might be.

There was no heart, but I saw, beneath the bubbling gush of blood and puddings, a cold black orb of shining black stone. Even so, the abhuman, though he was torn open in the chest, wounded in the wrist, dropped his club and grappled with me. Such was his strength that even armor as stern as mine creaked and complained; I could not breathe, and my ribs were bending.

The Diskos, as if of its own accord, shortened on its haft, so that it was the size of a short ax rather than a pole-arm, and I threw my elbow over his shoulder and I severed his spine, even as he nearly broke mine. The low roar of my weapon gave off a shrill noise of triumph as the spinning blade sawed through hide and muscle, vertebrae and nerve-trunk.

The monster fell with me in his arms, and died, and I had to cut myself free of his grip.

Then, my blade still, utter darkness fell over the scene again; and I crawled away from the combat, moving on three limbs like an abhuman, one hand on the ground. My other hand held my Diskos, and I used it like an old man’s staff to support my steps.

Slithering noises of pebbles dropping was the only warning I had that the company of abhumans were scaling the cliffs behind me.

I made my way north and east for several hours, and a time came when I heard no more sign of my pursuit, and hoped that I had lost them in the canyon-mazes. I found a sandy pit with a smoking vent in the middle, for warmth, and rolled myself in my cloak, and slept, aching.

20.

Over the next three hundred hours by my dial, I rested and ate perhaps five times, perhaps six, and, because my supply of the tablet was running low, I only bit half a tablet for each daily meal. Pursuit drove me north and away from the country of the abhumans, west away from the pyramid.

Once a luminous manifestation meant to wrap me in her misty arms; but the fire which spun from my weapon could do hurt to subtle substances even when there was no material substance for the blade to bite; swirled lightning dispelled part of the tension that held her cloudy fingers together, and she flew off, maimed and sobbing.

Once a Night-Hound ran at me suddenly from the darkness, and I chopped him in the neck before he could rend me; the blade of the Diskos shot sparks into the smoldering wound, and the monster’s huge limbs jerked and danced as it fell, and it could not control its jaws enough to bite me. A soft voice from the corpse called me by name and spoke words of ill to me, but I fled. I will not write down the words in this place: it is not good to heed things heard in the Night Land.

21.

The land here was furrowed into long parallel valleys, each valley thick and deep with fungi and pale moss-bush. These valleys were always perpendicular to the route I fled along, so the nights were long climbs upward (with the light of the Last Redoubt shining over my shoulder) and long clumsy descents in utter blackness. At the bottom of each valley was a river or stream, bubbling with strange chemicals and seething with strange smells, and it was no easy task to cross in full armor.

After each rest, I was further north, and closer to the ice cliffs that loom behind the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, and so the streams were colder to cross, and the drench was colder and more deadly to me as I climbed forth on the far bank. After each rest, I was also further east, and the shine of the pyramid fell upon me only after a longer climb up the eastern slope of whatever valley I was in. A time came when I reached the peak of the valley, and no shine fell upon me.

Even the tallest tower of the Monstruwacans was not tall enough to see into this land where I now found myself. I was beyond all maps, all reckoning.

At first, I walked. Each score of hours my dial counted, I slept four. Because there were crevasses, I struck the ice before me with the haft of my weapon as I walked. Then I grew aware of how loudly the echo of my metallic taps floated away across the utter darkness of the icy world, and I grew very afraid.

After this, I crawled across the ice in utter blackness. I surely crawled in circles.

After four score more hours, about half a week of crawling, I felt a pressure in the air. It was so malign that I was certain one of the Outer Presences must be standing near. All was utter black, and I saw nothing but ghosts of light starved eyes create.

For about an hour I crouched with my forearm bare, my hand numb without my gauntlet, and the capsule touching my lips; but the pressure against my spirit grew no greater. I heard no sound.

So I crawled away. Over many hours I crawled and slept and crawled again, but whatever stood on the ice behind me, I could sense its power even as a blind man can feel when the door of an oven is opened across the room. I took my bearings from this, and kept the power forever behind me.

A time came when I saw light in the distance. I went toward it, and, over very many hours, I began to sense the downward slope of the ice. The path soon became broken, and I crawled from crag to crag, from high hill to low hill of ice.

The light grew clearer as I trudged down the mighty slope of ice, and I could see the footing well enough to walk. I put my spyglass to my eye, and scanned the horizon.

Here I saw, looming huge and strange, the head and shoulders of the Northwest Watching Thing. The crown of its head was mingled with the clouds and smokes of the Night Land; and to the left and right of his shoulders, like wings, I saw long, streaming shafts of pure and radiant light. This was the reflected glow of the Last Redoubt, bright in the dark air of the night world.

I was behind the Watcher; seeing it from an angle no human person had ever seen it. The Last Redoubt was blocked from view; I was in the shadow of the monster.

A cold awe ran through me then, as if a man from the ancient times were to wake to find himself on the side of the moon (back when there was a moon) that forever turned its face away from earth.

I had come into the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill.

22.

When Hellenore’s father forbade the courting of Perithoös to go forward, they began to meet by secret, and my father’s mansions, the darkened passages of Darklairstead, were used for the rendezvous. I helped Perithoös because he asked it of me, and I felt obligated to do him a good turn, even though it troubled me. As for Hellenore, she was beautiful and I was young. She barely knew I existed, but I could deny her nothing. She had many suitors; how I envied them!

Once, not entirely by accident, I came across where Perithoös and Hellenore sat alone in a bower before a fountain in the greenhouse down the corridor not far from the doors of my father’s officer’s country. The greenhouse was built along the stairs of Waterfall Park, downstream from where a main broke a thousand years ago. Near the top, it is a sloping land of green ferns under bright lamps, and the water bubbles white as it tumbles from stair to stair, with small ponds shining at the landings. Near the bottom, the ceiling is far away, and the lamps were dim. At the bottom landing is a statue of the Founder’s Lady, surrounded by naiads, and water poured from their ewers into a pond bright with dappled fish whose fins were fine as moth-wings.

Through the obscuring leaves that half-hid them, I saw Perithoös sitting on the grass, his back resting on the fountain’s raised lip, and one arm around Hellenore’s bare shoulders. In his other hand, he held a little book of metal, of the kind whose pages turn themselves, and the letters shined like gems; ferns and flowering iris grew to their left and right, half-surrounding the pair in flowery walls. Her head was on his shoulder, and her dark hair was like a waterfall of darkness, clouding his neck and chest.

In this wing of the greenhouse, many of the lamps had died a century ago, and so the air was half as bright here as elsewhere. To me, the view seemed like a cloudy day, or a sunset; but I was the only one in all mankind who knew what twilight was. How strange that, so many millions of years after it could not ever be found again, lovers still sought twilight.

As I approached, I heard Hellenore’s soft laugh–but when she spoke, her whisper was cross. “Here he comes, just as I foresaw.”

Perithoös whispered back, “The boy is sick for love of you, but too polite to say aloud what is in his mind.”

“But not polite enough to stay away from where he is not welcome!” she scolded.

“Hush! He hears us now.”

I pushed aside the leafy mass of fern. Crystal drops, as small as tears, clung to the little leaves, and wetted me when I stepped forward.

Now she was primly kneeling half a yard from him, and her elbows were in the air, for she had pulled her hair up, and, in some fashion I could not fathom, fixed it in place with a swift and single twist of her hands. The same gesture had drawn her silken sleeves (that had been falling halfway to her elbow) back up to cover her shoulders.

Perithoös, one elbow languidly on the fountain lip, waved his book airily at me, the most casual of salutes. “Telemachos! The lad who lived a million lives before! What a surprise this would have been, eh?” And he smiled at Hellenore.

I bowed toward her and nodded toward him. “Milady. Perithoös. Excuse me. I was just…”

Hellenore favored me with one cool glance from her exotic, tip-tilted eyes, and turned her head, her slender hands still busy pinning her hair in place. If anything, her profile was more fair than her straight glance, for now she was looking down (I saw that there were amethyst-tipped hair-pins driven point-first in the soil at her knees), and the drop of her lashes gave her an aspect both pensive and demure, achingly lovely.

Seeing himself ignored, Perithoös plucked up a fern-leaf, and reached over to tickle Hellenore’s ear. She frowned (though, clearly, she was not displeased) and made as if to stab his hand with one of her jeweled pins.

Perithoös playfully (but swifter than the eye could see) grabbed her slender wrist with his free hand before she could stab him, and perhaps would have done more, but he saw my eyes on him, and casually released her. I wondered how he dared be so rough with a woman so refined and reserved; but she was smothering a smile, and her dark eyes danced when she looked on him.

I said awkwardly in the silence, “I had not expected to find you here.”

Perithoös, “By which you mean, you expected us to flee before we let ourselves be found. Come now! There is no need to be polite with me—I see all your dark thoughts. You came to gaze on Hellenore. Well, who would not? She knows it as well. How many suitors have you now, golden girl? Three hundred?”

My heartbeat was in my face, for I was blushing. But I said merely, “I hope you see my brighter thoughts as well. Of the three of us, surely one should be polite.”

Perithoös laughed loudly, and was about (I could see from his gesture) to tell me to go away; but Hellenore, her calm unruffled, spoke in her voice that I and I alone knew had the cooing of doves in it: “Please sit. We were reading from a new book. There are scholars in South Bay Window, on level 475, who have challenged all the schoolmen, and wish to reform the ways the young are taught.”

I did sit, and I thought that Hellenore must have been well-bred indeed, to invite so unwelcome an intruder as I was, to consume the brief time she had to share with her young wooer.

She passed the book to me, but I read nothing. Instead, I was staring at sketches that had been penned into the flyleaves. “Whose hand is this?” I said, my voice hoarse.

Hellenore tilted her head, puzzled, but answered that the drawings were her own, taken from her dreams.

“I know,” I said, my head bowed. And by the time I raised my eyes, I had remembered many strange things, things that had happened to me, but not in this life.

They both looked so young, so achingly young, so full of the pompous folly and charming energy of youth. So inexperienced.

Perithoös was looking at me oddly. Though I do not have his gift, I would venture that I knew his thought, then: He saw what I was thinking, but did not know how someone my age could be thinking it.

Perithoös said, “Telemachos will be against it, no matter what the South Bay Window scholars suggest. All new things pucker up his mouth, for they are sour to his taste.”

“Only when they are worse than the old things.” I said.

Perithoös tossed a leaf at me: “For you, that is each time.”

“Almost each time. Mostly, what is called ‘new’ is nothing more than old mistakes decked out in new garb.”

“The New Learning is revolutionary and hopeful. Come! Shake off the old horrors of old dreams! The world is less hideous than we thought. These studies prove that the outside was never meant for man; do you see the implication?”

I shook my head.

He said happily: “It implies that our ancestors did not come from the Night Lands. We are not the last of a defeated people, no, but the first of a race destined to conquer! The Bay scholars claim that we have always dwelt in this pyramid, and deny the old myths. Look at the size and shape of the doors and door-handles. It was clear that men first evolved from marmosets and other creatures in the zoological gardens. Our ancestors kept other creatures who bore live young, cats and dogs and homunculi, you see, in special houses, this was back before the Second Age of Starvation. I assume our ancestors ate them to extinction.”

I blinked at him, wondering if he had lost his mind, or if I had lost my ability to tell when he was joking. “ ‘Evolved’?”

“By natural selection. Blind chance. We were the first animals who were of a size and stature to pass easily down these corridors and enter and exist in the places here. Other creatures were too large or too small, and these were cast out in the Night Land after many unrecorded wars of prehistory. The New Learning allows us hope to escape from the promise of universal death for our race: We need merely wait for the time when we will evolve to be suited to fit the environment outside; and we will be changed; and those horrors will no longer seem hideous to the changed brains of the creatures we shall become.”

I said sternly: “The Old Learning speaks of such a possibility as well. It is hinted that the abhumans were once True Men, before the House of Silence altered them. The tradition of the Capsule of Release is not without roots.”

“Prejudice! Antique parochialism! The only reason why what we think of as True Men prevailed, is because our hands were best fitted to work the controls of the lifts and valves, our eyes best adapted to the lighting conditions, and we were small enough to enter the crawlspaces if giants chased us. Those giants outside are outside because they were too big for these chambers.”

“And if we never dwelt in any place except this pyramid, whence came the ancestress of Hellenore? Whence came Mirdath? Or does your book prove she does not exist as well?”

He opened his mouth, glanced at Hellenore (who gave him an arch look), and closed it again. He dismissed the question with an airy wave of his hand. “Whatever might be the case here, skepticism will break down all the old rules and old ways, and leave us free. To live as we wish and love as we wish! Who could not long for such a thing?”

“Those who know the barren places where such wishful thinking leads,” I said heavily, climbing to my feet.

Unexpectedly, Perithoös seemed angry. He shook his finger at me. “And where does thinking like yours lead, Telemachos? Are we always to be frozen in place, living the lives our ancestors lived?”

I did not then guess (though I should have) what provoked him. The traditional way of arranging a marriage, and so, by extension, the traditional way of doing anything, could not have had much appeal for him, not just then.

I spoke more sternly than I should have: “We are men born in a land of eternal darkness. We grope where we cannot see clearly. Why mistrust what ancient books say? Why mistrust what our souls say? Our forefathers gave us this lamp, and the flame was lit in brighter days, when men saw further. I agree the lamp-light of such far-off lore, is dim for us; but surely that proves it to be folly, not wisdom, to cast the lamp aside: for then we are blind.”

He said: “What use is light to us, if all it shows us is images of horror?”

I said, “There are still great deeds to be done; there will be heroes in times to come.” And I did not say aloud, but surely Perithoös saw my thought: unless this generation makes all its children to forget what heroism is.

“Bah!” said Perithoös. His anger was hidden now, smothered somewhat beneath a show of light-heartedness. He smiled. “Will our writings be published in any other place than within these walls? Why will we do praiseworthy acts, when we know there will be nothing and no one left to sing our praises? Even you, who claim you will be born once more, will have no place left to be born into, when this redoubt falls.”

I said, “Do not be jealous. I am not unlike you. This life could be my final one. You both have had others you forget; but this could be the first you will remember next time.”

Perithoös looked troubled when I said this; I saw on his face how eerie my words (which seemed so normal to me) must have sounded to him.

Hellenore said eagerly, “What do you remember of us? Were Perithoös and I–” But then she broke off and finished haltingly; “How did the three of us know each other before?”

I said, “You were one of Usire’s company, and lived in a strong place, a place of encampment, in a valley our telescopes no longer see, for the Watching Thing of the Northwest moved to block the view, once the House of Silence smothered the area with its influence. You, milady, were an architect, for women studied the liberal arts in those strange times; and you were possessed of the same gift you have now. In those times, you saw these ages now, and you sculpted one of the orichalcum doors before the main museum of Usire’s stronghold, and wrought the door-panels with images of things to come.”

Perithoös smiled sourly. “What Telemachos is not willing to say is ….”

I interrupted him. “Madame, I was favored by you then, though I was of high rank and you were not. I helped sculpt the other door with images of things that had been.”

Hellenore looked embarrassed. I hope my face did not show the shame I felt.

I turned to Perithoös, but I continued speaking to Hellenore, though I did not look at her. “What Perithoös is not willing to say is—since we are being honest and free with each other’s secrets—he cannot fathom why I am not jealous of your love for him, even though he can see in my mind that I am not. He sees it, but he does not believe it. But that is the answer. Last time, he lost. This time, me. It does not mean we are not friends and always will be.”

Hellenore was disquieted: I could see the look in her eye. “So I have not loved the same man in all ages, in every life…”

She was no doubt thinking of Mirdath the Beautiful, whose own true love was constant through all time.

I said awkwardly: “You have always loved noble men.”

But she was looking doubtfully at Perithoös, and he was looking angrily at me. Odd that he was now angry. Surely I had said no more than what he had been about to say was in my mind. But perhaps he did not expect Hellenore to take seriously the thought that they were not eternal lovers.

Perithoös said: “No doubt if we three are born in some remote age in the future, and find ourselves the very last left living of mankind, you will seek to do the noble deed of poisoning minds against me, and worming your way into intimacies where you are not wanted! Is this the kind of praiseworthy and noble things you practice, Telemachos?”

Angry answers rose to my lips, but I knew that, even if I did not say them aloud, Perithoös would see them burning in my heart. With no more than a nod, and a muttered apology (how glad I was later to have uttered it, even if they did not hear!) I spun on my heel and marched from the grove, dashing the wet ferns away from my face with awkward gestures. The scattered drops dripped down my cheeks.

Behind me, I heard Hellenore saying, “Don’t speak ill of Telemachos!”

Perithoös spoke in a voice of surprise. “What is this?” (which I took to be a sign that she had not had in her mind what to say before she spoke).

She said, “I foresee that my family will bring more pressure to bear against Telemachos, for my father suspects he knows the secret places where we meet. He will bear it manfully, and not betray us, though his family will suffer for it—you have chosen your friend well, Perithoös.”

Perithoös said, “Ah. Well, he actually chose me.”

She murmured something softly back. By then I was out of ear-shot.

23.

My dial marked sixty hours passing while I descended the icy slope into this land, Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, and I slept twice and ate of the tablets three times. The altimeter built into the dial measured the descent to be twenty-two thousand feet. During the middle part of that time, I passed through an area of cold mists where the air was unhealthy, and left me dazed and sick.

This area of bad mist was a low-hanging layer of cloud. The cloud formed an unseen ceiling over a dark land of ash cones, craters, and dry riverbeds, lit now and again by strange, slow flares of gray light from overhead. The ash cones in this area were tall enough to be decapitated by the low-hanging clouds. I spent another thirty hours wandering at random in this land, hoping to stumble across some feature or landmark I would know from my memory-dreams.

Once, a flickering gray light of particular intensity trembled through the clouds above. I saw the silhouette of what I thought (at first) was yet one more ash cone; but it had a profile; I saw heavy brows, slanting cheeks, the muzzle and mouth-parts of a Behemoth, but huge, far more huge than any of his cousins ever seen near the Last Redoubt. A new breed of them, perhaps? It was as still as a Watching Thing, and a terrible awareness, a sense of sleepless vigilance came from it. It was taller than a Fixed Giant, for the dread face was wrapped partly in the low-hanging clouds, and wisps blew across its burning, horrible eyes. How one of that kind had come to be here, or why, was a mystery before which I am mute.

I looked left and right. In the dim and seething half-light of the cloud overhead, it seemed to me that there were other Behemoths here; two more I saw staring north, their eyes unwinking. I traveled along the bottoms of the dead river-beds after that, hoping to avoid the gaze of the Behemoths: but now I knew the place I sought lay in the direction the giant creatures faced.

The gray light faded, and I walked in darkness for thirty-five hours. A briefer flare of gray light came again; and I saw, in the distance, a great inhuman face gazing toward me, and yet I saw nearer at hand, another Behemoth to my left facing toward him. By these signs, I knew the massive shadow rising between me and that far Behemoth was what I sought.

The colorless light-flare ended, and all was dark as a tomb. But I felt a faint pressure, as of extraterrestrial thought reaching out, and I feared the Behemoth facing me, over all those miles, had seen me.

I crept forward more warily. The ground here was becoming irregular underfoot, sloping downward. I walked and crawled across the jagged slabs of broken rock I found beneath my feet and fingers, ever downward. I could not see enough to confirm whether this was a crater-lip.

After another mile, ground changed under my hands. Here there was ash and sand underfoot, for soft debris, over the aeons, had filled this crater-bottom. I was able to stand and move without much noise, and I waved the haft of my weapon before me in the dark as I walked, the blade unlit, like a blind-man’s cane, hoping it would warn me of rocks or sudden pits or the legs of motionless giants.

After an hour’s walk or two, under my boot, I felt smooth and hard stones. Stooping, I traced their shape in the dark. They were square, fitted together. Manmade. A road. A few more steps along, I felt something looming in the utter dark near me: by touch, I found it was a stele, a mile-stone cut with letters of an ancient language.

I knew the glyphs from former lives: the name spelled USIRE.

One hundred, two hundred paces further on, and my fingers touched the pillars and post of a great gate. I touched a bent shape that had once been a hinge: I touched the broken gate-bars, the shattered cylinders that had once been pistons holding these doors shut against the night.

Beyond the doors, I felt nothing but more sand, and here and there a slab of stone or huge column of bent and rusted metal. I sensed nothing alive here; no Earth-Current pulsing through power-lines; no throb of living metal. The place where wholesome men dwell often will carry a sense in the aether, like the perfume of a beautiful woman who has just left the chamber, a hint that something wholesome and fair had once been here: there was nothing like that here.

Instead, I felt a coldness. I felt no horror or fear in my heart, and I realized how strange that must be.

I was surely near the center of where a ring of the Behemoths bent their gazes; even in the dark, I should have felt it as a weight on my heart, a sense of suffocation in my soul. Instead I was at ease.

Or else benumbed.

How very silent it was here!

Slowly at first, and then with greater speed, I backed away from the broken gates that once had housed the stronghold of Usire. Blind in the utter dark, I ran.

I was still in the open when the gray light came again, and slowly trembled from cloud to cloud overhead, lighting the ground below with fits and starts, a dull beam touching here, a momentary curtain of light falling there, allowing colorless images to appear and disappear.

I beheld a mighty ruin where once had been a metropolis; its dome was shattered and rent, and its towers were utterly dark. Here and there among the towers were shapes that were not towers, and their expressionless eyes were turned down; watching the ruins at their feet, waiting with eternal, immortal patience, for some further sign of the life that had been quenched here, countless ages ago.

More than merely giants stood waiting here. The gray light shifted through the clouds, and beams fell near me.

A great company of hooded figures, shrouded in long gray veils, stood without noise or motion facing the broken walls. They were tall as tall men, but more slender. The nearest was not more than twelve feet from me, but its hood was facing away.

The next two of the coven stood perhaps twenty feet from me, near the broken gate; it was a miracle I had not brushed against them in the dark as I crept between them, unknowing of my danger. Even as quiet as I was, how had they not heard the tiny noises I had made, creeping in their very midst?

Then I knew. It was not the noise carried by the air they heeded. It was not with ears they heard. They were spirits mighty, fell, and terrible, and they did never sleep nor pause in their watch. A hundred years, a thousand, a million, meant nothing to them. They had been waiting for some unwise child of man to sneak forth from the Last Redoubt to find the empty house of Usire, dead these many years. They had been waiting for a thought of fear to touch among them: fear like mine.

With one accord, making no sound at all, the dozens of hooded figures turned, and the hoods now faced me.

I felt a coldness enter into my heart, and I knew that I was about to die, for I felt the coldness somehow (and I know not how this could be, and I know not how I knew it) was swallowing the very matter and substance of my heart into an awful silence. My cells, my blood, my nerves, were being robbed of life, or of the properties of matter that allow physical creatures such as man to be alive.

I turned to flee, but I fell, for my legs had turned cold. I made to raise my forearm to my lips and bite down on the capsule, but my arm would not obey. My other arm was numb also, and the great weapon fell from my fingers. Nor could my spirit sense the power in the metal any longer, despite that the shaft and blade were still whole. The Diskos was still alive, but I wondered if its soul had been Destroyed, and feared I was to follow.

Then I could neither move my eyes nor close them. Above me there was only black cloud, lit here and there with a creeping gray half-light. A sharp rock was pushed into the joint between my gorget and the neck-piece of my helm, so that my head was craned back at a painful angle; and yet I could not lift my head.

The Silent Ones made no noise, and I could not see if they approached, but in my soul I felt them drifting near, their empty hoods bent toward me, solemn and quiet.

Then the clouds above me parted.

I saw a star.

24.

Whether all the stars had been extinguished; or whether the zone of radiation that surrounds our world, transparent in former ages, had grown opaque; or whether there was merely a permanent layer of cloud and ash suffocating our world, helping to slow the escape of heat, had been debated for many an age among savants and knowledgeable people. Of these three, I had always inclined to the last opinion, thinking the stars too high and fine to have been reached by the corrupt powers of the Night Land.

That the Night had power to quench the stars was too dread to believe; but that the stars should have the grace to push aside the smog and filth of the earth, and allow one small man one last glimpse of something high and beautiful, was too wondrous to hope.

I cannot tell you how I knew it was a star, and not the eye of some beast leaning down from a cliff impossibly high above, or some enigmatic torch of the Night World suspended and weightless in the upper air, bent on strange and dreadful business.

And yet more than my eye was touched by the silvery ray that descended from that elfin light; I saw it was diamond in heaven, indeed, but somehow also a flame and a burning ball of gas, immensely far away; and how such a thing could have a mind, and be aware of me, and turn and look at me, and come to my aid in my hour of need, I cannot tell you, for diamonds and flames and balls of gas do not have souls; but neither can I tell you how a hill, shaped like unto a grisly inhuman thing, could sit and watch the Last Redoubt of Man, without stirring and flinching for a million years. Is the one more unlikely than the other?

I felt strength burning in me, human strength, and I raised my head.

The coven of Silent Ones was here, but the blank hoods were lifted and turned toward the one star. The thoughts, the cold thoughts of the Silent Ones were no longer in me.

A fog was rising. As mild and as little as the light from the star might have been, it somehow made little fingers of white mist seep up from the sand.

There may have been a natural, rather than a supernatural explanation for this; but I doubt it. Like a veil, the pure cloud rose to hide me from the enemy; the delicate rays of this one star still shined through these pearly curtains, and illuminated them, and made every bead and hanging breath of the mist all silvery and fair to see.

If this were not supernatural, then the supernatural world should be ashamed that such wonders can be wrought by merely natural means, by starlight, and little water-drops.

While the Silent Ones were closed off behind a wall of fog, I picked up my weapon and crept away. I was blinded, so I followed the star. Here and there about me in the silvery mists, I could see looming shadows of the Silent Ones, terrible and motionless. And yet they did not sense me, or do me hurt, which I attest is starkly impossible, unless but that one of the Good Powers that old tales said sometimes save men from the horrors of the Night had indeed suspended the normal course of time, or relaxed the iron laws of nature out of mercy. No one knows these things.

The star led me to where a little stand of moss-bush spread. Beneath the bush was hid a door, set flat into the rock underfoot; and one of the leaves of the door had been forced inward a little way against its hinges. The crooked opening was large enough perhaps to admit a man, or the small nasty crawling things and vermin of the Night Lands, stinging snakes and centipedes, but too narrow to let any of the larger brutes or monsters pass in.

The star went out, and the mists that hid me began to part. I saw tall shadows slanting through the mists, and feared the Silent Ones were drifting near.

I doffed my helm and breastplate and undid my vambraces, that I might be lithe and small enough to squeeze in through this crack. It might have been wise to drop my armor into the crack before I went in; but wisdom also warned me not to make a clatter, so I pushed the armor plates beneath a moss-bush, where (I hoped) they would not be seen.

The edges of the door scraped and cut me; I was blood-streaked when I fell into the dark place beneath.

25.

Of the wonders of the city of Usire, I have not space to say. Let it suffice that there were many miles of rock that had been mined out to form the fields and farms beneath the dome, and that the dome itself, even broken, was a mighty structure, many miles across, and half a mile high. There were places where the feet and legs of the Behemoths had broken through the roof, and I would peer out across a shattered balcony to see the knees and thighs of rough and leprous hide, knowing that somewhere, far below, were feet; and the palaces and museums, fanes and libraries of Usire, a great civilization of which the folk of the Last Redoubt know nothing, lay trampled underfoot. Many layers of roof and hull had been shattered in the footfalls of the giant, back, ages ago, when the giants walked; darkness and cold had entered in.

26.

I found the doors of orichalcum I had seen so often in my dreams.

The images carved into the right-hand leaf of the door were as I had seen them, exactly (now that the memory came back to me) as I had carved them in a former life.

The right-hand door was of the past: here were sculpted images of starfarers landing their winged ships on worlds of bone and skull, horror on their faces as they came to know our earth was the only world remaining in all the universe not yet murdered. The fall of the moon was pictured, and the sundering of the earth-crust. Here were the Road-Makers, greatest of all the ancient peoples; and there were the Cliff-Dwellers, whose mighty cities and empires clung to endless miles of chasm walls, during the age when the upper surface of earth was ice, but the floor of the great rift was not yet cooled enough for men to walk upon it. Here was an image of the Founder, tracing the boundaries where the Last Redoubt would rise with a plow pulled by a type of beast now long extinct: and this was a legend from the first aeon of the Last Redoubt; and twenty aeons and one have passed since that time.

The left-hand door held images from the end of time: the Breaking of the Gate was pictured here, and the severing of man into two races, those trapped far below ground, and those trapped in the highest towers, when all the middle miles of the Last Redoubt were made the inhabitation of unclean things that wallowed in the darkness. The tragedy of the Last Flight was pictured, millions of women and children of the Upper Folk attempting escape by air, in a winged vehicle like those used by our earliest ancestors; the image showed the winged ship, buoyancy lost, falling among the waiting tribes of sardonic abhumans, the loathly gargoyles, and furious Night-Hounds.

The time of the Final Thousand was shown, when all living humans would know not just their own lives, but the lives of all who came before, so that each man was a multitude; each woman, all her mothers.

Here was a picture of the Last Child, born by candlelight in her mother’s ice-rimmed coffin; there was an icon of the Triage. Three shades, representing all the dead fated to fade from the world’s dying aura, were bowing toward the wise-eyed child proffering their ghostly dirks hilt-first. Any shade the Last Child shunned, had no hope of further human vessels for its memories.

The final panel of the furthest future, which formed the highest part of the left-hand door, showed the Archons of High Darkness, Antiseraphim and other almighty powers of the universal night, seated on thrones among the ruins of the Last Redoubt; and while Silent Ones bowed to them; and the Southern Watching thing fawned and licked their dripping hands; all the books and tools and works of man were pictured heaped upon a bonfire around which abhumans cavorted; and the greater servants were shown eating the lesser servants at feast.

These images were fanciful, mere iconography. The Ulterior Beings have no form or substance, no shape that can be drawn with pencil or carved in stone. Nonetheless, the door-maker carved well the nightmare scene, and I knew what she meant to portray.

This was on the right, in the past, at highest part of the door, an image directly opposite the image of the triumphant powers of darkness at feast. Here, golden, was the many-rayed orb which was meant to represent the Last Sunset, which was the earliest legend of the earliest time, and, in the foreground, here was the mother and father of mankind, holding hands sadly and watching the dusk; the man was pictured with one hand raised, as if to salute, or bid farewell, whatever unimaginable age of gladness had ruled the upper air before that time.

I was cheered to think that, even then, my ancient self who made these doors had not considered the days of light to be a myth to be ashamed of.

I put my shoulder to the cunningly carven panels and pushed.

They were the doors to a museum, of course.

Here I found the dusty and rusted wreckage of broken stalls and looted displays: tarnished machines, broken weapons, dead glasses, and empty bookshelves. But in the ruin was one machine, shaped like a coffin, still bright. Light came from its porthole.

This casket was a type long forgotten in the Last Redoubt, able to suspend the tiny biotic motions we call life, each cell frozen, and carefully thawed again by an alchemy that revives each cell separately. These once had been used in aeons when men ventured into the Void, but those who slept too long in them came out changed, troubled by strange dreams sent to them from minds that roamed the deepest void between the stars, and loyal to things not of earth.

Inside the casket was Perithoös.

27.

I wiped the frost from the porthole to peer inside. He was horribly maimed; scar tissue clotted his empty eyesockets; his left arm was off at the elbow, a mere stump. No wonder he had never attempted to find the Last Redoubt again: blind, maimed, and without the Capsule.

A few minutes' search allowed me to find a spirit glass in an alcove; I brought it back and connected it to the physician’s socket by means of a thinking-wire cannibalized from an inscription machine. I tilted the glass until I caught an image of Perithoös in it. And there, shining at the bottom of his soul, tangled in a network of associations, dreams, fears, and other dark things, like a last redoubt, besieged by fear yet unafraid, was the thing in us that knows and recognizes the Master-Word.

I whispered the Master-Word. The shining, timeless fragment in his soul pulsed in glad recognition.

Human. Perithoös was human.

The Master-Word stirred something in him. Even though he was frozen, his blood and nerves all solid, there was sufficient action in his brain to allow his thought to reach through the armor of the coffin and touch my brain:

You came!

“I came.”

28.

It was not unexpected that even a frozen man could still send and hear thoughts. If this method of suspending life could have also suspended the spiritual essences of life, and kept them safe, the star-voyages of early man would not have ended in such nightmarish horror, for the space-men would have been deaf to the things that whisper in the dark of the aetheric spaces, and would have returned from the void whole and sane.

Slay me and then slay yourself. We are surrounded by the powers from the House of Silence.

“I came to save you, not to kill you.”

I merit death. I slew Mirdath.

“Mirdath? She lived and died many generations ago.”

Hellenore. I mean Hellenore. My only love; the fairest maid our pyramid ever knew. She was to be my bride. And I also slew her child. The child in the womb reached out and touched my mind, and told me things I should not have heard.

“Your child?”

No. A creature who carried her off to the Tower-Without-Doors and violated her; things were done to her womb to permit her to conceive a nonhuman.

I winced at the thought. “What creature? An abhuman?”

No, though it answered to them. The bridegroom was a thing bred or made by the arts of the House of Silence, in the centuries since the fall of the Lesser Redoubt.

I knew that when that Redoubt fell, out of all those millions, only Mirdath had been saved. Of the rest, not all of them had been allowed to die without suffering, especially not the women, and most were put to pain of the type death does not ease.

“You call it a bridegroom? She married it?”

The abhumans mock our sacraments. You know why.

I nodded. It is not enough that we die; that will not satisfy them. They must make the things we deem precious seem grotesque and ugly, even to us, so that there is nothing fair left in the world. (I speak of the lesser servants, the ones once human—we are not in the thoughts of the greater ones).

The bridegroom bit my weapon out of my hand, and tore off my arm, but the capsule buried in my forearm broke beneath its iron teeth, and venom filled its mouth.

“It died instantly?”

No. Its unnatural life stayed in its frame long enough to slay the rest of my men.

I killed the child with my thoughts, for its life was weak: but Hellenore, by then, had no soul to slay, and I strangled her one-handed while she clawed out my eyes. Such was my last sight.

Slay me, that I may cease from seeing it ever and again forever.

“Many a weary mile, I have walked to save you, Perithoös, for I will not fail of the promise we made as children. Why did you call out to me, across all miles of the Night-Lands, if you did not wish me to bring you back into the warmth and human comfort of our mighty home?”

I cannot open the door.

“Do you mean the casket lid?”

The door that opens to escape from a life that grows intolerable. The door that honor commands men to use when all other doors are shut. You must open the door for me. You of all men know that there is something beyond that door, and that it opens back into this life again, but with forgetfulness, blessed forgetfulness, to quench the pain of memory. There is much I must forget.

A picture came from his brain-elements into the visual centers of my brain. It was an image of Hellenore, her eyes filled with childish faith in the man she loved. She raised a gauntlet too large for the slender hand that bore it, and tilted back a helmet too large for her, and raised her mouth for one last kiss, before she slid down a rope from a small window in the postern gate.

Away across the black and grainy soil of the Night Land she walked; and there she was, outlined for a moment against the glow of the Electric Circle; then she was gone.

She had not been moving as those who are Prepared are trained to move, skulking from rock to rock, or standing motionless to let one’s gray cloak blend with the gray background, avoiding discolored patches of ground. She did not know how to walk.

And she dragged the great weapon behind her, for the weight was more than she could bear, and she wheeled it like a wheel-barrow on its blade; an image that would be comical, were it not so horrifying.

His thoughts were clear as crystal, sharp as knives:

She will not be born anew. The darkness consumed her. I have destroyed her forever. I sent her into the Night without a capsule, without the words and rites, without the exercises of the soul and mind, carrying a weapon she had never swung before, in armor too big for her.

More images. Perithoös had sent her out. He lowered her on a rope from a window in the postern gate and watched her walk away. His gift allowed him to choose a time when the portreve was one who admired his fame too much to turn him in, and the gate-warden he could blackmail with knowledge taken from the man’s own guilty mind.

The enormity of the crime was too great for me to take in. I was overcome with emotion at that moment. The strength left my legs, and I sat. My weapon I put down, the first time it had left my grip in weeks. I put my head in my hands.

“Madness!” I said. “Madness. There were simpler ways to die, and ways that do not carry hundreds of dead down with you! Was she so jealous of Mirdath, did the law that forbids women to walk the Night Land offend her so much? Did she so much want to be thought more manly than a man? It was not enough for her that she was more fair than women?”

That was not the reason.

Eventually, I said softly: “Why?”

For love.

“What?”

Love. Surely that emotion excuses us from all limits, all law. We thought we could be together, here. We thought the stronghold of Usire would provide us some sanctuary against the Night, but that we would be far from the Pyramid, free to live as we wished…

“Madness! Would she step to the bottom of the sea without a suit, or play with lepers without an immunity? Ah, but you don’t know about oceans or lepers, do you? All old things are dead to you, including the wisdom of our laws!”

Some old things I know. I gave her a harquebus from a museum, and brought it to life with the Earth-Current. I rendered it obedient to her with my thought. The piece was able to discharge a streamer over 900 yards, carrying a charge enough to kill a Dun Giant.

“You know why the ancients forbade us to use such weapons. The energy can be sensed from miles away, even of a single shot. Or do you? How little do you know of the world you live in, of what has come before? Why trick her into killing herself in such a foolish fashion? Surely it would have been simpler to throw her from an embrasure, or dash out her brains against a post, or bury her alive. Did you want to feed them? Feed the horrors?”

I was imagining her, surprised by a petty-worm or scorpion, touching off the voltage, and sending a lighting bolt echoing across the darkened land. I imagined the thing we see shadowed in one of the windows of the House of Silence tilting its dark head toward the source of the energy-noise. I imagined Night-Hounds, pack upon pack, swarming down from the Lesser Dome of Far Too Many Doors, baying as they came.

I spoke in a voice made hollow and weak from despair and disgust. How could he overlook what was so plain to see?

“No woman, ever, must travel in the Night Lands. Here are monsters to slay us.”

She thought she would foresee them, or that my spirit would warn me ere they came near. And…. And….

“And what?”

I had prepared everything for us, a capsule she could carry in her poke, an instrument that would lead us to where the Stronghold of Usire was, by the traces of Earth-Current it still gave off. If the instrument sensed nothing, we would turn and come back home; and so there was no risk—we thought that the monsters would stay clear of any land were the Earth-Current was running. And if we found this place, we could reconnect the White Circle to the Current, sanctify the ground, and erect an Air Clog of our own, stronger than that we had left. It would have been, not as safe as Home, but safer!

“You sent her off by herself? By herself?!”

I meant to meet her before the hour was gone! Less! Forty minutes, no more! Time enough for me to descend and escape out of a wicket, carrying the other gear. I had to stay behind to joggle the power, or else the Air Clog would not have parted for us.

From a low window, we had together picked the rock where she was to hide and wait for me; it was less than eighty yards from the gate! Eighty yards! She could not have mistaken the rock; we had studied every feature lovingly. She could not have mistaken the rock! It was cleft like a miter, and one part jutted like my sister Phaegia’s nose.

He said more, much more, then; many excuses, much sophistry. I could not make myself heed his thoughts. My own thoughts were too loud: I kept picturing what it must have been for her.

To be trapped in the darkness of the outer lands, being hunted by Night-Hounds, to have the eyes of inhuman beings searching the unending night—and then, after hunger and weariness and nightmares and false hopes—to be found by the Cold Ones, and taken to their secret places, and to have one’s nervous system laid open, and all one’s intimate thoughts laid bare. And then to be raped by unclean creatures, and then to marry one’s rapist. And all this time to wonder why one’s own beloved, one’s true love, the beloved you trusted and cherished above all others, to have him merely abandon you to this fate…

I was walking up and down the aisles of the ruined museum, looking for an axe or heavy bar. It was not something I meant to think, but I was looking for something to smash in the casket lid, and expose the freezing innards to the air. (Even in my anger and turmoil, I note that it never occurred to me to use the Diskos on him: it is something we only ever swing against monsters. I do not know if any human person has ever been struck with one.)

Perithoös broke into my endless circle of thought: I tried! I was prevented! I wanted to come after her immediately. That was our plan, but–

I pounded my fist against the portal where his frozen, maimed face was held in ice. The noise was loud, but the glass held, despite that hardness of my guantless.

Like water bubbling from a holed jug, my anger left me. Men who have eaten nothing but the tablets for weeks do not have stomach enough to stay angry.

I sat down again.

“But you were arrested by the magistrates, weren’t you?”

Yes.

I said: “They granted clemency on your promise that you would venture out after her. Has the world gone mad? You mocked the law that says no woman ever may venture into the Land; they mocked that law that forbids a man of unsound mind or unfit character may go. You were but a callow youth, perhaps that can excuse; but they were judges. Men of the law!”

The judges thought that no punishment the hand of man could mete out would match this.

“And no one else could trace the screaming, her voice you could hear in your head, back to the source: they needed you to find her.”

The Silent Ones let her scream so that others would come forth from the Pyramid and be Destroyed. They opened their barrier to let my call reach you for the same reason.

I nodded sadly. And the Silent Ones would have had me, had not one of those Powers that no one can explain intervened.

You know I betrayed you.

“You were afraid the Silent Ones would destroy you unless you called other children of men out from the Last Redoubt. It is an old, old trick. An old fear.”

A fear you do not share. What is wrong with your thoughts? Why are you not afraid?

“I was spared.”

The Silent Ones will not permit us to leave this place! I am wounded and blind—how can you hope we can cross the Night Land together? Hellenore said she saw many pairs of boot-prints leading out, but only one coming back in. You will live. Not me. It is fated.

I said “Fated. I don’t understand why Hellenore went forth. Were her visions of the future unclear? Did she have some vision that told her she was to be a wife and mother, but it cruelly deceived her?”

I deceived her. She saw what was to come. I told her not to believe her visions.

“Why did she listen to such a stupid idea?”

Because you deceived her. You convinced her that fate could be changed.

“I said the opposite; that we must endure what could not be changed.”

She was convinced of that, too. Even when I talked her into venturing forth, in her mind there was nothing but grim resolve. Women sacrifice much and suffer much to become our wives, to bear our children; nature inclines them to endure great sacrifice.

“A sacrifice for what? For what gain? She knew that bloodshed and destruction would spring from her going-forth. What–”

Something like laughter came from his frozen brain. She saw far, far into the future. Isn’t it obvious? I found the shaft. I reconnect the main leads. I restored the power. As I had planned from the start. But it took me months.

“What do you mean? What–?”

Are you an idiot? The casket is powered. The Earth Current is alive here, still strong, but deep, deep beneath the rock. And so the victory of the dark powers here is not complete.

You must return to the Last Redoubt with this news: if they drive a shaft deep enough, and at an angle to find the sources directly beneath this spot, the Last Redoubt will live out its promised span of life five million years hence; otherwise we fail within a few hundred years.

The engineering needed to drive a shaft so many miles to find so small a place might be beyond the powers of the present generation of men; but there would be generations to come. The gardens, and fields, and mines beneath the Great Redoubt were so extensive, that, compared to that work, what Perithoös proposed was not an insurmountable matter.

I cannot explain why I laughed. The laughter was bitter on my tongue. I said, “So all our proud and vain dreams of returning as heroes will come true, won’t they? We will be lauded. I can think of no more just punishment for folly, than to have foolish wish come true.”

We?

(I admit the word surprised me as well. It just slipped out; but, once I had said it…)

“We.”

I am blind and crippled, and wicked besides.

“You are coming with me.”

If I return to the pyramid, the magistrates will condemn me to death.

“And so your wish shall be granted! Or perhaps the law that you may not stand twice for the same offense will forbid a new hearing. If judges still uphold our laws, which seems not the fashion among these modern folk. In any case, it is their affair, not mine.”

Why do you not bestow the death my acts have merited? Have you no sense of justice?

“Well, obviously, not so much as I should have. A just man would have not answered your plea.”

I felt a stirring in the aether, as if he were gathering his brain-elements to send a thought, but the thought was too confused, too full of shame, to send. Had his face not been frozen, I wonder what his expression might have given away.

“You put me on trial, didn’t you? You pretended to misplace the Master-Word. If I had been a man of justice, obedient to our laws, I would have been safe, and never answered you. I failed your trial and you condemned me to death and annihilation at the hands of the Silent Ones. Your justice condemned me; but something spared me. I wonder why. Why was I spared?”

You knew you should not come. Why did you come?

I came because I am a romantic fool, the kind of fool it is easy to fool. But he had asked the wrong question.

“Don’t ask why I came. Ask why had I been permitted to come. Ask why the cunning of the House of Silence did not prevail. A miracle was wrought to permit me to be here. My certain destruction and doom was set aside. Why?”

I saw now why the star had parted the clouds to touch me, and to restore my life to me.

It was, at once, a reprieve and a punishment heavier than I could imagine: for my punishment was to stand, in relation to Perithoös, as that star had stood to me, and save him. To be his friend, despite all his crimes, all his foolish pride and boastful madness, to be his friend nonetheless, and save him.

Perhaps the Good Power that had saved me meant to save the Last Redoubt as well, to let the message go through telling where another vein of the Earth-Current could be found in the shrinking core of the planet. But, somehow, I doubted it. The things that seem great and momentous to men, I am sure are of little matter to the Ulterior Powers who sometimes protect Life.

I knew the words to start the rebirth cycle for the coffin, and how to adjust the feeds to bring the Earth-Current back into his body, so that uneven thawing would not mar him.

I picked up my weapon again, and leaned on it. The Earth-Current within the haft was aware of the current flowing in the casket: a phenomenon spiritualists call affected resonance. It felt good to have the warlike spirit of my Diskos propping me up at that moment; in a former life, I owned a boarhound, and his loyalty had been not unlike this.

Perithoös touched his mind to mine again, but weakly. His spirit was faint, for his aura was being drawn back close to his flesh in preparation for the decanting, he would sleep many hours before the lid would open and he would wake. But I heard him.

I don’t understand.

“How can you not understand me? You see my thoughts.”

I see your thoughts, but they are senseless.

Strange. My thoughts seemed perfectly clear to me.

The same madness that drove Perithoös into the night was the only thing that might save him from it. The love that binds friends or brothers is no less real than that which binds wooer and beloved. The power that saved me surely knew what a boastful and foolish man I was: But mothers do not strangle their babies if they are born lame; the stars do not cease to shine on us if we men cripple ourselves.

And I should not abandon my friend, whether he was a true friend to me, or not.

Men's souls are crooked and unsound things, not good materials out of which to build friendships, families, households, cities, civilizations. But good or no, these things must be built, and we must craft them with the materials at hand, and make as strong and stubborn redoubt as we can make, lest the horrors of the Night should triumph over us, not in some distant age to come, but now.

We are surrounded by the Silent Ones. We are fated to die. One of us will perish before we regain the pyramid; Hellenore saw only one pair of footprints leading back. How is it possible that we both shall live?

But by then the cycling process was too advanced, and his thoughts lost focus. Many hours must pass before I would open the lid, and answer his question.

As I carried him on my back, out past the golden doors, I led his blind hand to touch the bas-relief on the left panel of the golden doors.

Here, on the panel carven long ago by Hellenore in a former time, was a small depiction of one small event of what, to her, had been the future, now our present. Here was a man without a breastplate or helm, wearing only gauntlets and greaves, carrying a one-armed man on his back; a blindfold (but I knew now it was a bandage) covered his eyes.

The image showed a star shining down on them, and the gates of the Last Redoubt opening to receive them. Only one pair of footprints led in.

Cry of the Night-Hound

Circa AD TWENTY-ONE MILLION

(Four million years before the final extinction of mankind)

29.

The monsters still howl for him, months after he fell. In the gloom, I can sometimes see one or the other, sometimes both together, wolfish beasts with leathery hides and dark bristles, and they raise their grinning, shark-like mouths to the black clouds above and utter their cries.

Impossible that such horrors could love a child of man, and be faithful; impossible. Yet they do not molest the body, nor even approach it.

My brother Polynices lies in plain view on the baked black salt of the Night Land. The hollow where he fell has a smoke-hole in its center, some five yards beyond his motionless, outflung hand, and the smolder from the hole casts a light across his form.

He lies many miles below the armored windows of our redoubt, but even so, the spy-glasses and instruments of the Monstruwacans (those scholars whose business it is to watch the horrors of the Night) leaning from the balconies, can pick out minute details.

The fingers of his gauntlet are stretched out, as if he were reaching for the little warmth of the smoke hole as he perished. He lays on a slight incline, for a circle of salty mineral surrounds the smoke hole and slopes toward it. His boots are toward us. The smoke hole is to his left. His helmet fell from his head, and rolled a yard down the salty slope. The little trail the helmet made as it fell is still visible. There has been no wind, no earth tremors, to disturb the salt crystals and erode the trail. The haft and great wheel of his disk-ax weapon lay to his right, and the shadow of his body falls across it, making details difficult to make out, even under the immense magnifications of the Great Spy Glass. The hair I used to tousle has continued to grow as the months have passed, and now falls across the shoulder-plates of his armor and spills onto the salt. I cannot see those wild locks without wishing for my comb of nacre to put the tangles right. He was always careless of his appearance.

Because of the angle of his fall, I cannot make out his face. Did he die calmly? Or is a rictus of hollow terror and despair frozen forever on his features?

His right forearm is hidden under his body, as if his teeth were seeking the lethal capsule buried under the flesh of his forearm when he fell. Did he fall too swiftly to bite the capsule, and slay himself wholesomely, before his soul and spirit were Destroyed?

There is no blood visible. There is no sign of wounds.

30.

When we were young, my brother and I found a long-deserted balcony lock, and from a previous life he remembered the word to open it.

He and I would climb through the broken armor of the window in one of the abandoned cities in the base level of the Pyramid. With fearless hearts and unsteady feet we would pick among the tilted slabs of imperishable metal, and find a little niche, about five hundred yards above the Night Land, open to the thin air and stinking fumes. We would sit with our lunch basket and spyglass on the corroded lip of some ancient corbel, our legs dangling and kicking above the smoke and darkness of the Land, and we would hear the voices of monsters muttering and hissing underfoot, see the glinting eyes of remote and cyclopean faces, or feel the dull throb of their malice beating against the sheath of energized air surrounding the Pyramid.

There was a series of irregular stairs leading down and down from a little ways below that spot, but we never dared to venture down.

I remember I wore short-pants then, like a boy’s. During my childhood, before I had a name, I was called Païs or Meirax, or something of the sort; the servants called me Annasa, of course.

Because my father was the Castellan, the nurses and tutors had no credible threat to make when I defied them, or tore my girlish pink bloomers to shreds. Later, when I was old enough to know what grief my antics caused my father, or what pleasure my father’s critics in the Opposition Seats, I dressed more demurely outwardly, though inwardly, I suppose, I was much the same.

31.

From the steles we found on that hidden cleft, at the top of those forbidden stairs, we knew this place had been made by the Labdaciteans, great-grandfather’s people. The locks recognized our life-patterns, and called us by his name.

We knew the tale. Before even grandfather was born, Labdacus eroded the power of the Architects, by making climbing paths not shown on their charts, to run from window to window between the levels, that his loyal retainers might circumvent the blockades, when Architects cut power to the inter-municipal Doors, or grounded the great Lifts. Grandfather Laius, when he came of age, rose to preeminence on the promise that all such unlawful paths and places would be destroyed, and the Last Redoubt brought once more into honest conformity with the Great Central Survey of the Architectural Order.

As an adult, I know the horror of wondering if there is some gallery, portal, or open window, unwatched and unlocked against the subtle malice of the enemy, a hole a spider could wriggle through, or a crack to admit a weft. Even we, young as we were, were scandalized to see the breach of Labdacus. His crime was solid before our eyes, as plain to touch as the smooth hole cut in the armor. The massive, ill-made blocks of crooked stair lead down from it as a blood trail leads down from a wound. But it was a pleasing scandal, and our fear made us grin sickly grins, for it was our great-grandfather who had committed, not a petty crime, but a great one.

We promised each other we would never do anything so wicked as meddle with the walls and wards by which Man lives.

But we were also pleased to have a secret known to none, a place only those of the blood of Labdacus could pass. We considered our promise fulfilled by vowing to tell no one of our find. The idea that we should have immediately sent for the Architects, or the local Officer of the Watch, never crossed our young minds.

We were the children of the Castellan, after all.

32.

Not long after my age of majority, not long after my father’s death and the ascension of Creon to power, I came to tread these same broken slabs of ancient metal again.

This time, my footsteps were not as sure as a thoughtless child’s would have been, nor was my costume as suited for the adventure. I wore a skirt to my ankles and a blouse buttoned to my throat, and my hair was pinned up and coiffed in a fashion I envied when it was forbidden to me, but which was now a bother to dress and maintain. My gloves clutched the corroded wall as I inched in my foolishly heeled shoes across the sloping face of the armor, a dizzying drop to the lands of darkness opening up behind and below my bustle.

The child I had been would not have known me. Païs had been so unafraid, and I was so fearful now.

Once only I looked over my shoulder. In the light of a recent volcano, I could glimpse the tall shadows of two kiln-giants, their heads together as if in consultation. One of them raised a heavy hand and pointed at me, while its lamp-eyed companion nodded. This unnerved me, so I clutched the metal beneath my gloves more firmly, and returned my eyes to the task.

I made it around the last turn and came with relief to the sturdier footing and broader step of the ancient and unused corbel.

Polynices was in his armor, standing where once he’d lunched as a child. The long handle of his disk-ax weapon was in his hand, and he leaned upon it in an attitude of alertness, his head staring down at the darkened Land.

He was listening.

Up from the gloom underfoot came the mournful, haunting sound of a Night-Hound, baying.

Having found his hiding place, I did not wish to speak, lest I startle him. I had the mental image of him dropping his Diskos over the side, or, worse, himself.

He said, “Rightly or wrongly, the dogs are mine, and I must feed them.”

I said quietly, “They are monsters. They are howling because they thirst for your blood, not because they love you.”

Polynices shook his head grimly, not bothering to look back at me. “Draego saved my life from the Abhumans. I fed him from my hand, and he knows not how to eat from any other. See! Even now he will not hunt among the crags and chasms of the Night Land, or worry pale flesh of slug-things from their lightless holes or blind fish from poisoned lakes. He starves, and stands before the gates of the Last Redoubt, and howls his love and sorrow for me. Dracaina is often with him, and joins her weeping voice to his.”

“Monsters. Do you not understand the word? Enemies of man.”

“Not these. Love can break even the power of the Night. My dogs are my friends.”

“They are not dogs! They are Night-Hounds!”

He said nothing, but listened to the mournful howling of the monsters far below.

On and on they wailed. Once, both Night-Hounds fell silent, when the Great Laughter began to issue from a buried country to the east, a deep trench whose upper crumbling banks are visible from the Last Redoubt. Another time, the Hounds were silenced again when a deep and monstrous Voice from a cold volcano cone called out in a long-forgotten language, uttering a rough shout that traveled and echoed across the Night Land like a clap of thunder, traveling away to the North. The Night-Hounds were hushed for a while, perhaps cowering in terror, but then their howling and lamenting began again.

“I had a dream that you would die.” I told him.

He said, “I will find a way to smuggle food out to them. I do not fear the law.”

The Great Laughter issued from the eastern hills and canyons at that moment, trembling across the strange and barren landscapes of the Night, and this seemed a fitter answer than anything I could devise.

33.

The chief tale of the House of Andros tells how a woman who perished like Polynices, without a mark, without a sound, in the Night Lands, by a singular and peculiar miracle, was revived, and lived and bore fifty sons and daughters who became the ancestors of my house and phylum.

I should think the implications of this are obvious.

34.

To watch over the body of my brother, I stand on a high balcony, some five miles above the hills and plains, glaciers and craters, volcanoes and venom-lakes of the Night Land, and I look over my brother through one of the spyglasses of the Monstruwacan, the monster-watcher, of this tier.

The Great Redoubt rises seven miles above the cratered landscape, motionless waters, smoking pits and dull fumes of the Night Land, and the Tower of Observation a full mile beyond that. The Night Land is not utterly dark, for strange flares of light, burning torches hanging in the gloom, or foetid burnings from smoke-holes will illume one thing or another, and there are candles in the windows of an Empty City to the Northeast. From the embrasures of the Great Redoubt, as from a mountainside, what little there is to be seen, can be seen.

Haemon, my betrothed, stands near to me. He is beautiful, with great dark eyes and long lashes, but broad of shoulder and narrow of waist, with strong hands and a ready smile. I wish he were not so young. I wish I could love him as I ought, enough to blot out other loves from my heart.

35.

The embrasure is open to the night air, and I can smell the sulfur fume from some lingering volcano miles away to the east, and can hear the soft calls of voices from beneath the Deadly Lake, or the scrapes and grunts of behemoths digging at the foundations of the Pyramid. In the middle distance, between my view and the Pit of the Red Glow, a tall shadow passes. At that distance, the being would need to be a third of a mile high to be visible, and it was probably a Manifestation, rather than something made of matter as we understand it.

At first I turn the spy glass down. Below and to the east is a line of low hills, which geologists say to be the slag and tailings of the Diggings of the Giants beyond, although the hills block my view of the digs. Nonetheless, I can hear the noise of their labor, the thudding of machines, and see the vapor rising from the warm caverns they excavate. Mathematicians argue about the volume of the hills, or how large is the tunnel they are mining. The work has been going on for perhaps two thousand years, and the estimate is that in another four thousand, they will have opened a vent far enough down the buried sides of the pyramid that the influence of the Electric Circle will not dismay them. If they reach deep enough, they will contact the armored surface sheathing our buried country of farms. Some savants aver the Giants have no art nor tool that can scratch or scar our armored walls; others are doubtful. The less doubtful place faith in those prophecies or reports dreamers of future times confirm, that it will be four million years, not a mere four thousand, before the Outer Beings break in to our mighty home and slay us all.

A squadron of Dun Giants, the same race as those who dig, are encamped before our gates. They squat in low, round, windowless huts made of broken slabs, which, in previous ages, fell from upper balconies, or were thrown down to repel assault. Our instruments from time to time detect the mutter of machines beneath, which perhaps supply the crude huts with heat or wholesome air. When some noise from our windows attracts them, the Dun Giants take up their mattocks and truncheons, and come stand as nigh the Electric Circle as they dare, hooting and bellowing, and making massive gestures with their arms.

Three of the Dun Giants, seventy-one years ago, fell motionless, and stand upright, neither alive nor dead, very near the lower gate. Measurements taken over the last forty years show they are growing about half an inch every ten years. In four hundred thousand years they will be the size of the Fixed Giants old records say were once grouped around the Lesser Redoubt before its Fall. Their eyes glitter as they watch us, and no other part of them can move. Already their lower trunks and legs are swollen and coated with a dark crust.

The sensitive instruments of the Monstruwacans report that there are strange energies building up in them, as the years pass, and their psychometric range passes farther and ever farther from the norm of biological life. About once a decade, the one on the left utters a great, slow roar of terror and woe, as if the monster regrets what departs from it.

I pause to check the fit of the skull-cusps. A dial shows the protective flow of Earth-Current is steady. Then I bring the glass up to the middle focus, and look left and right at sights more dangerous to view.

Here is the Northwest Watching Thing, a motionless mountain of something that lives, though it is not flesh and blood, nor anything we understand. It is the darkest and most mysterious of the Watching Things, for there is no light nearby to it, and it is also said to be the most deadly, for the land before it is flat and clear for many miles, with few places to hide. Once, a million years ago, it loomed in the light from the Red Pit, and the Monstruwacans of those ages could gaze upon its great, grim face hanging outside our windows like the legendary moon of elder times. An inch per century, glacier-like, it circumnavigated the Pit, and now is in the shadows to one side of the Pit, and so will be for another half million years. Mathematicians predict that in five hundred thousand years, it will move forward so that the light from the Pit will be behind it, and our remote descendents will be able to examine its silhouette clearly.

From time to time, if ground-lightning discharges near the mountain-slopes that form its legs and paws, the reflection will show the great monstrous head tilted forward at an angle, a terrible great nod, and our stories say that it moved its head to this position when two brave fools from an earlier time ventured forth and came too near to it.

If the men of the eldest days of the world had seen the moon turn its huge, gray, sterile globe when ancient astronauts drew nigh, so that mountains and seas never before seen, drawn into view from the hidden, farther side of the moon, would now be visible rising and setting over all the lands of men, their astonishment could not have been more than ours, to know the Watching Thing inclined its head at an angle different from what uncounted hundreds of thousand of years had known.

Many miles from it, looms its brother, the Watching Thing of the Northeast. It is also called The Crowned Watcher, for a dull halo of blue light hangs ever above it, and throws its face and hunched shoulders into shadow. No features can be seen in that shadow, and it is not even certain whether the being has eyes. But one enormous bell-like ear is spread out from the side of a skull larger than a hillside, and very ancient reports hint that the ear sometimes can be seen to quiver, when the noise of voice and music from the Last Redoubt, or human laughter, or the rush of wind from our great air-cycling machines, or the lap of water from our indoor fountains and lakes, steals across the icy air. Whether it can pick out individual voices from the pyramid, or hears our individual footsteps and heartbeats, is a matter of speculation and debate.

The long furrows or discolorations that streak its elbow and arm, some say are evidence that a race of servile beings once raised towers and aqueducts along the creature’s lower slopes, perhaps to render it medical aid. Others say the discolorations are a sign of a rotting skin disease, and what look like the foundations of ruined towers are merely pockmarks. Since there is no light on its mask or chest, it cannot be said whether the discoloration continues to other parts of its skin or not. No person has ever ventured near enough the Watching Thing of the Northeast to settle the dispute.

I can center the view along the imaginary line joining the crowns of the two monsters, and track left to pan across the dark gloom between the two Watching Things. Here, on a low hill a few miles north, shine the unwinking lights of the House of Silence, and I see the outline of its roof and eaves. In all the millions of years our histories record, those lights have never wavered, never blinked, nor has any one of them gone out, nor any new one joined their number. The great main doors of the House of Silence stand wide open, and our long-range telescopes can glimpse the passageway beyond, sloping downward. Since eternity, those doors have never been shut.

A hooded figure stands half-hidden at the doorpost of the entrance, facing inward. Philosophers who study such things opine that there might be a second hooded shape, standing at the opposite doorpost, facing the first; but the open leaf of the Silent Door blocks any view from the Last Redoubt.

Once, three hundred thousand years ago, Aetius the Unwise, viewing from the Tower of Observation through the Great Spy Glass, claimed to have seen the hooded figure nod, as a man might nod to another in a conversation; and he entered this in the Great Log of the Monstruwacans. From this basis, Aetius wrote a monograph claiming that there must be a second hooded one, positioned opposite in the shadow of the never-closed great doors, and facing the first. However, the entry in the log is surrounded with doubt and controversy, for Aetius’ watch officer, the man on duty to record and confirm the sighting, had also been staring for too long at the lights of the House of Silence, and went mad, and slew himself by putting his head beneath the geared wheels of the Great Spy Glass as the engines were turning it. The name of the watch officer is not recorded in our archives. Since the testimony of Aetius is unsupported, the Monstruwacans note his sighting as “unendorsed” and leave the topic of the Second Hooded figure as an open question.

The name of the particular branch of science devoted to speculations about the doors of the House of Silence is called Ostiumology: the two competing theories, whether there is one figure or two, are called Monoianitorianism and Bianitorianism.

I know this because the sad, wild thought ever occurs to me that Polynices, from his position, as he died, saw what is hidden behind the second valve of the doors to the House of Silence, the doors that never in eternity have closed, and he could have settled the disputes of the academics for once and all.

One more adjustment of the dial, and I can drop my view in a straight line. Less than eight miles from the House of Silence, in the middle of an otherwise unnamed and unremarkable landscape of scattered firepits and sickly moss-bushes, I can find the smoke-hole where my brother fell.

Sometimes the smoke is thick, blocking all view. Sometimes the smoke is agitated, flying in a quick stream straight upward, and the fire below is active, so that enough light spills from it that I can glimpse his form.

I have watched every waking-period for the last nine months, waiting. Perhaps I was waiting for the return of the mist-man, whose insubstantial body shined with light, or perhaps an eruption of volcano or ground-lighting, to cast a glare across the body that would be cleaner and clearer to my sight than the fitful flickers of the smoke-hole.

I can adjust the dials of the spyglass so that Polynices seems to be almost in my arms. He seems a short way off, and could I but reach out my hand, I should touch him.

He is not a short way off. And whenever the image in the spyglass grows misty with tears, and whenever I forget myself, I do reach out my hand, and my hand is too short to reach him, my brother who lies unburied and unmourned so many miles away.

36.

“You have watched your brother’s corpse for nine months.” Haemon spoke with cautious delicacy, as one who is unwilling to argue, but unwilling not to argue.

I said, “There is still no sign of deterioration.”

He sighed. “For seven months you have sent out hour-slips, asking if any man among the millions is bold enough to venture forth, and recover your brother’s body. My father the Castellan will forbid you to ask again: later this watch he will make the announcement.”

I looked at him sidelong. “How do you know?”

He smiled his easy smile, but did not answer. Handsome as he is, there are many among the High Court who would have welcomed his friendship, even were he not of penultimate rank, the most elite of the most elite phylum. He had no need to seek out courtiers to spy for him.

“Hear this, “ I said, “The Castellan may rule the civic business of the Great Redoubt, but he does not rule me.”

His charming smile vanished. “But, darling, my father rules the comings and goings from the Great Lower Gate, which have not been opened in one hundred years, except for your brother’s expedition. The time when men venture forth from the pyramid and walk the lands of night and death are passed.”

“There are lesser gates no records betray. My brother used one to go Out and feed his monsters. I know the word to open it.”

“You contemplate mere madness, my beloved. The Castellan has placed your brother’s name on the interdicted list, and decreed that no songs should be sung of him, and no eulogy pronounced. Published obituaries are ordered to consist of his birth-hour, his father’s name, his hour of elevation, matriculation, and communion, and a list of his criminal charges, and no more.”

I said nothing, but my knuckles were white on the dials of the spy glass.

Haemon continued speaking, his voice was soft, tactful, the very soul of reason: “The escutcheon of your father’s branch of the family will be blotted with an image of a mutilated crone; your house paean will be replaced with the cry of the Night-Hound, and these humiliations are to linger until such time as monsters rend and despoil that man’s body, nameless hereafter, who lays face-down in the crater of black salt, near the fume of the smoke-pit.”

I speak without taking my eye from the eyepiece of the glass: “Then the blot will never be removed, for my brother’s body will be recovered. His name is Polynices.”

“No man will venture forth for you.”

“Will you go?”

The lovely smile returned. “Gladly will I die for you, beloved, but should I, even for you, allow my soul to be Destroyed by the Slowly Turning Wheel which still haunts the area where your brother fell?”

“Then I will go.”

“Madness! Ancient laws forbid that women venture forth.”

“My brother shall live again. He is not dead.”

37.

There are one thousand cities, some empty of life and light, others green with wintergardens and gold with incandescent lamps, each metropolis smaller and higher than the one beneath, all protected under the sloping walls of our seven-mile-high pyramid where the last of the human race are besieged. Polynices, once the dreams started to afflict him, told me there was a time before our records reach, when men walked and built upon the surface beyond these mighty walls.

I remember it was a twelvemonth before my Naming Day, when he first spoke of this to me; for I was in my older sister’s room, seated before her looking glass, wearing her dancing uniform and pinning up my hair. The uniform was a white tunic and bright red pantaloons whose leggings were wider than a skirt. I was curious to see what I might look like this time next year, once I could wear my hair up, as a grown woman can, to show the line of my neck. I had the glass viewpoint adjusted to show me from behind, so I could only see Polynices from the back, and I was looking over his shoulder at first one coiffeur of mine, then the next.

I said to him lightly: “Impossible that men once walked abroad! The Night-Hounds would have eaten them. And can men live in eternal gloom, with only scattered firepits for light, and only moss-bush and sand to eat? You cannot tell me they drank from the waters of the Cold Venom Sea.”

“I mean,” he said patiently, “Our ancestors once walked abroad, in a time when things were not as now.”

“Your ancestors and mine? Of course! We know there was a second race of humanity living elsewhere. In the Lesser Redoubt. Nine hundred thousand years ago it fell, but here is the proof that it once reared a tower above a land of endless darkness.” I plucked a hair from my head and waved it, giggling.

“Beautiful hair, mistress,” murmured the indentured girl helping me brush and comb. She was older than I was, but I don’t recall her name. I think she was from a city somewhere in the four hundreds. The air pressure there is different, because of a failure of the machines in ages past, and her folk are said to have acuter hearing than those of us who live on highest decks.

Polynices was not impressed. His hair was as dark as mine, his cheek as high, his eyes as slanted. “No,” said he, “I mean the ancestors of all the men of all the cities of the Great Redoubt. We walked abroad, and farmed, and rode. All men. I saw it.”

I said, “You no doubt recovered a dream from a braver day than this, if all the men tested their boldness by venturing into the Dark! Perhaps the numbers of mankind were fewer, or the sources of metal more, to equip every jack and squire with arms and armor, and Earth-Current flowing without meter or without rationing, to charge the weapons and weave the broad gray cloaks that keep the deadly chill of Everlasting Night away. Ah! You must have seen a wondrous time indeed!”

I remembered being delighted with the fancy, speculating what men must have been like, in that long-lost era, when folk still ventured from the Pyramid; men like Andros.

I said sadly: “Weren’t the gates sealed and fused shut years ago?”

38.

Now I stand on the balcony and study the creatures guarding my brother’s body. When atmospheric conditions are right, long range microphones can pick out the noise of their cries. Usually it is but one, rather than both; and they go away for weeks at a time. But always they come back, barking and wagging their poisonous tails, as if expecting him to rise again, and feed them from his hand. When he does not rise, they throw back their heads and utter their mournful cry.

There is a noise like that in my heart, a whining howl that goes on and on.

I should not envy them. And yet they stand within a few yards of him. They can see his features, his brave face, which the angle of his fall hides from me.

How foolish the brutes are. He will never rise again. Not for them.

If only I could stand where they stand.

39.

The men of my father’s generation were too timid to venture Out.

The encampment of Dun Giants did not exist in ages past. Some power feeds an unnatural life in them, so that they need not scatter in search of the unwholesome moss or fungi and deadly meats that sustain them in the dark. Well fed, they are able to maintain an unceasing watch against our doors, and rise up in many numbers should any of us emerge from our armored fastness.

My grandfather Laius once told me the tale of Cyrus and Darius venturing forth. He said it happened in his youth that the pair went forth together. One year when subterranean vapors sent the Dun Giants into a stupor, they found an opportunity to slip the leaguer. They meant to gather aetheric photographs of the black aura surrounding the Great Northwest Watching Thing, and perhaps creep close enough to the Blue Shining Plain to measure what the shining substance was, or discover why it was so deadly.

The two adventurers entered the Blue Plain, and were lost from sight for many weeks, and thought dead, for no person had ever entered that place and lived. But then, beyond all hope, long-range spy glasses detected two figures emerging from the silent blue fires on the far side of the plain. They were spotted once and twice again, dark silhouettes crossing patches of white ice, heading north and west.

Then, in the fiftieth hour after they had been seen to emerge, an unexpected eruption of a volcano spread a red and beating light, and revealed their position. The Great Northwest Watching Thing had not moved in perhaps a million years, but it tilted its head toward the two adventurers, who stood, still as posts in the sudden glare, in the midst of a flat and open place.

At once all the Night Land was filled with voices, and the Land Whence Comes Great Laughter began to yammer and shout. Beasts climbed from their pits and holes that dot the dark plain between the Place Where the Silent Ones Are Not and the diseased plateau above which burn the Seven Unwinking Torches.

The two men dashed away from the volcano-firelight and entered the Broken Land, a place of pits and escarpments. Hours turned into weeks as the monsters prowled and hunted the two adventurers, and millions watched from the balconies of the Great Redoubt for some sign of them.

One was eaten by a Night-Hound. Grandfather said the Night-Hound dragged the body very near to our gates, and sat on its haunches and playing with the corpse, dandling the body from its paws and ripping it, while harquebusiers shot ineffective lances of fire at the monster from lower windows.

The other adventurer was making his cautious way back toward the pyramid. Grandfather told me that schoolboys and matrons returned every waking-period to the Viewing Table chambers for their cities, to see if the Great Spy Glass or any lesser glasses had caught a glimpse of the surviving adventurer in his gray armor sneaking from moss-bush to moss-bush, or darting across the baked mud of exposed ground.

Eventually the report came that he was seen, pale in the gloom, running naked toward the House of Silence, his head hanging oddly as he ran, his armor and weapons gone. He entered the Doors that have never closed since the beginning of Eternity.

Some observers stared at the House for many hours and days afterwards, hoping to catch perhaps a glimpse of the lost man through the uncased windows of that place, and these observers had to be sedated later, for they saw the beckoning dreams and heard the soft voices that those who stare for too long at the House sometimes see and hear, and it was clear their mind-training had not been sufficient to defend them.

I don’t remember which one, Darius or Cyrus, was slain by the Night-Hound and which one was called into the House of Silence and Destroyed.

40.

I remember Polynices’ answer, that time when we spoke in my sister’s chambers. He said, “The gates are not fast shut. A man could walk out into the Land our ancestors walked freely, every one of them.”

My brother’s words inspired me. I tried to imagine a time when every man was as brave as Andros. Surely in such an age, every woman would have been as fair as Mirdath, or so I concluded in my girlish certainty.

“Such bold men!” I said again, “To tempt death so gallantly.”

“All men and women too. I do not mean each man ventured forth on one brief mission as a test of strength. I mean we walked the Land and it was our own. Many folk lived in houses and cities not far from the Great Pyramid, each one surrounded by its own Electric Circle of protective energy, its own sheath of Air-Clog to dispel the voices and beguilements and stench. So much light was shed by the lower balconies in those days, that green gardens grew in the open air, along the long angles of light from the lower windows.”

“Foolish! No woman has ever trod the poisoned black grit of the Night Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful. Our laws forbid it.”

“This is a time before that law, before the Siege of Man.”

“Some dreams are merely figments: impressions from our daily toil and pleasure, combined and recombined in our fancy when our waking nature retires.” Since my brother was older than me, I enjoyed correcting him.

He shook his head slowly. “I sleep beneath a dreaming glass. The glass showed the images had a time-depth of over five million years. I saw a flock of pigeons fly out from the windows of one great balcony, their wings supported by the thick, warm air of those lost ages, and fly back into others. The birds carried trinkets and letters or stamps of perfume from lover to beloved, loves forbidden by the eugeneticists or stricter parents of those aeons. That image was from a previous life, long before the Seven Hundred Year famine, when all megafauna of our underground parks were hunted to extinction, long before the Time of the Weakening, before when any pets or livestock above the insect level of organization began to be sensitive to influences from the Nine Iron Towers, and had to be slain.”

I said, “Then your glass was untuned! The winged shape we see in decorations was never based on a real creature: birds are as mythical as stars. The atmosphere beyond the Air-Clog is too weak to support a kite, or a living kite creature. And beside, you said you saw humans riding! If we rode between these scattered houses gathered around the skirts of the great Redoubt, where are the remains? We should see rolling glide-ways here and there between points where human ruins once had been.”

“I do not mean we rode moving carpets like those that link our cities. I mean we rode on the backs of monsters. A creature called a hippos. It had the body of a Centaur and the head of a Gandharva. Other monsters ran along the ground before us and behind, in a pack. They would bay and give tongue when a monster who was a foe of man appeared, and the young men would direct his pack against such foes, or slay them with a spear charged with the Earth-Current.”

“Fantasy! Monsters kill us. We cannot ride their backs.”

“These creatures loved us.”

I noticed then that my lady’s maid was regarding Polynices with a wary look half-hidden in her eye, and so I excused her.

After she had gone, I hissed at him: “She is going to report you to the Remonstrators! Do you want the Masters of the Pale White Chamber to come examine you? Honest folk have been put under the Mind Glass for less than that! Do you care to draw the attentions of the Crowned Watcher to your words? The mental-influence insulation of the Great Redoubt cannot be made more perfect than the virtue of those within it will support.”

He was staring thoughtfully at the hatch where the maid had excused herself. He said slowly: “I fear no summons to the Pale White Chamber.”

“Why? Are your thoughts so pure? Our father’s rank will not protect us.”

He shook his head slowly. “Those who are undergoing the Preparation are immune from summons. So says the antique law.”

I pouted at him. “Did you find that in some old book? Surely the Watch was disbanded generations ago.”

“It still exists. Cadets in Preparation are considered members, and are hence immune from legal process, except by Writ from the Lord High Officer of the Watch.”

“Silly! Your cannot hide in the Preparation Chambers for more than sixteen sleeping-periods. After that, the Proctor will see you do not mean to go Out, and will thrust you from their preparation school, send you back to your home city and level, and place you back under the authority of the local Deacon. Then it is the Pale White Chamber for you. You will be cleansed there of this thought that the Devourers once were our friends: the thought is treason, blasphemy and suicide all at once!”

“I mean to go Out.”

The blood of Mirdath is in me. I am no Dreamer, like my brother, but I had a visualization then. At that moment, staring at my brother’s reflection in the glass, I also saw him, in my mind, as he would soon be: laying on black salt, his weapon to one side, his hand outflung to the other, his tangled hair spilled from his helmetless head: prone, motionless, dead.

I rose from my chair, dropping the combs and pins I played with, and reached up to grasp his broad shoulders. I do not recall what I said, or screamed, or wept, or even if I made a human noise at all. Perhaps I spoke in calm and measured tones of reason; perhaps I begged and vowed. I don’t recall. Eventually, he took my wrists lightly in his grip and shrugged me away. I swooned. My hands were too weak to keep my brother with me.

41.

The long straight hair I had plucked from my head, proof that in elder times men walked abroad from the Pyramid, lay visible against the bright metal fabric of my sister’s carpet.

The hair of my cousins is dark as the sky, as are many in my phylum. We are descended from the Last Daughter, whom the histories call Naäni, but we who are of her blood call her by the name she bore in her former life in the Days of Light: Mirdath the Beautiful. The first ancestor of the Andrides recovered her from the wreckage of her people’s shattered fortress, which was called the Lesser Redoubt; so called, for it rose no more than a mile in height, a pyramid of three sides, each side three quarters of a mile along its base. The main race of humanity were fairer of hue and hair than Mirdath had been, perhaps because the Earth-Current surged more strongly through her conduits and wall-segments, perhaps due to genetic meddling in the Lesser Pyramid of a type which the Masters of Life-Knowledge in the Great Pyramid have always forbidden.

I remember a tutor once telling me how history showed, during the days when men still dared the Outside, that the Sons of Andros were hardier to endure the cold, and stubborner to rebuke the Mind-Whispers than others who ventured in the Night Lands.

“The Lesser Redoubt, if ancient records are true, was settled by many who were restless of spirit, and went forth from the Great Redoubt, in a time before the Watching Things came from the Outer Darkness to beleaguer us. Eschatologists, who study the extinctions of those creatures, the insects, pets or livestock which once dwelt here in the Pyramid with us, call this pattern ‘self-selection.’ The stock of those who were restless to depart Our Mighty Home, and hardy enough to cross the Cold Waste and found another house, would preserve by that Diaspora, that very characteristic removed from the common stock by their departure.”

And, of course, Mirdath was revived when her body was lowered in its crystal coffin into the Crack beneath the foundations of our Pyramid, that Crack from whence the Earth-Current pours forth. Her exposure to those salubrious rays broke the trance, or coma, or little death encompassing her, and her lover, astonished to tears by the miracle, clasped her in his arms.

It may have been some strange quirk of her genetic code that enabled her to resist the deadly Powers and the thought-pressures of the Uncouth Things in the darkness of the Land. It may have been the love, eternal and potent, of Andros.

In my blood, the capacity for love such as his must yet dwell, since I am of the lineage of Andros. A sister’s love for her brother burns with a fire as divine as any man’s for his bride. In my brother’s blood, the fortitude to resist the Powers surely cannot be less than that of our great ancestress, and the capacity for resurrection must exist, for he is of the lineage of Mirdath.

My heart tells me this is so. I have no other evidences; but then, no other evidences are at hand.

42.

I remember how solemn, how quiet, was the ceremony before the Seventy-Seven ventured to the Lower Gate, and Out into the Night Land.

The men wore the stern gray armor and unadorned helmets, wore the living cloaks and carried the heavy weapons of our ancestors. For close foes, each man wore at his belt a fully-charged Dirk; for close friends, an uncharged Misericord, which poets call the mercy-knife. Each man carried a scrip with tablets, a horn of water-powder, a purification bowl, a home-pointing needle, a heat-stone and a basilisk-glass, just the same as any man of our race would have carried from any period in the last six millions of years. They carried no lanterns, no thinking-disks, no voice instruments that disturb the aether.

Down the great stairs they trod. The lower landings were snuffed of all light, and only the Masters of the Watch lined the stairs below that last landing, standing silently in their dun armor, their weapons held in salute. The other high-born stood with me above the lower landing, for even we were not permitted so close to the lower gate. All the stairs above were lined with crowds, multitudes without number.

How quiet we all were. The only noise I heard was Father’s serving woman, Optimina, who was quietly telling him what sights she saw as the men filed past, quiet as ghosts.

How handsome my brother looked in his armor, and how serene. All the brave young men following him had looks as brave and steady, and their eyes shined with pride.

A year later he returned alone.

43.

So strange to think back on that interval of time; to realize how much of my life I lived without him. I ended my novitiate with the spiritualists, and was proved both for invasions of the memory and dream. I was taught to use the fan, which is thought to be too alluring for little girls to handle. I was qualified in the use of both needle and wand, and selected my personal colors with the herald.

The palestra drilled me in the Quadrille, and the long-awaited ceremony commenced: all the maidens of my city performed our figures on a ten-acre-wide plate of energy, with a plate oppositely charged hanging above, a thousand athletic virgins filled with vitality, our fair young limbs flew up with bacchant cries; our skirts and streaming hairs were banners; our slender feet were thunder.

We wove our youth and purity into the ancient energy pattern, while stored force of a million years rippled across the motions of our contredanse. When I stepped from the plate, and the Sanguinarians confirmed I was fertile, the Humanitarians that I was un-deviant; and the Judge of Change offered the paten. We all pulled up our hair, girls no longer, and waited to be Presented.

The only mar was that I had not yet been Named. My House still kept the calendar of the Lesser Redoubt, and so the Quarter Cusp (as we reckoned it) was still a month and two days away, despite that I was Presented with my troupe. It was an awkward protocol: I was carrying a fan, but had to drink children’s wine, which is nine-tenths water. I had a needle in my sash-case, but it was uncharged. Little things like that.

So much had changed.

When Polynices left, Haemon had been no more than one of several friends of my brother before he left. A year later, he and I were promised to each other, waiting only for my Naming-Day to wed.

44.

The last time I saw my father alive was when he came to visit me in prison. I was high born, and so my prison consisted of my word that I would not leave my chambers. I suppose in times when the art of the Mind Glass was forgotten, or the deceptions of the Thaumaturges were remembered, a lady’s unsupported word could not be trusted. But as it was, my word was enough, and so all my books and memory-globes, dresses and thinking disks were here to amuse me, had I been able to be amused. All my soft furniture, silk hangings and serene light-images were the same to me as if they had been the bare steel walls of a penance cell.

Naturally, I was livid with rage when my father entered the chamber. He was led by the hand by Optimina, a woman even older then he is.

He coughed, and said to her softly, “Is that noise my daughter?”

She murmured, “Yes, lord.”

“Find me a chair. Not near enough for her to bite.”

“No, lord.” And the old woman led him over to a large chair. He felt the arms and sides for a moment so that he knew which way it was facing, and gingerly lowered himself into it.

I said in a ringing voice, “Has civilization reached a deepest nadir, then, that the innocent are kept in chains for speaking no more than simple truth?”

Father muttered to Optimina, “Is she in chains?”

She lowered her head to his ear. “No, lord. She is using an expression.”

“Ah. I was about to commend my partisans for their zeal.” He raised his head and said, “Why did you imagine that, being of a privileged bloodline, you should be allowed to dispute the law, which binds all others in the Last Redoubt?”

I said, “What law? There is but an edict of your own, saying Polynices may not return. Inhuman! You condemned him. It would have been only matter of hours before some Manticore sniffing the dun air would scent the blood of all the giants he has slain, or one of the Silent Ones would pause in its errands along the great road, and turn its hood toward where he hid. Once discovered, some Great Power of the darkness would come to drink his soul like rice wine. Your word doomed him to Destruction.”

He shook his head wearily. “That opinion, worthy of a girl of your tender years and unremarkable accomplishments, would have contravened no law, had you kept it within your boudoir. Instead you spoke it to a pamphleteer, and it was passed to the hour-slips, and soon became the talk of all the cities of mankind. Of course there were those, eager for the approval of so high-born a lady, who took your weightless words as weightiest commands: a group of bullies from the North Pantry-works rushed the gate, and beat the Night Watch into submission: the valve-wheel was turned, and, in a moment, without the lanterns being doused or the thoughts of men disciplined to silence, both airlocks and thought-locks stood wide. They cheered.”

He almost smiled then, but forced his lips into a line instead. Father’s organization had been telling the people for months what a hero Polynices was. Of course they cheered him. No one was allowed to tell any other version of the tale.

Yet it still pleased him.

Father finished in a grim voice: “The idiots cheered your brother, and their voices rang out into the Night. Your brother and his two monsters entered, while the Dun Giants stood blinking in astonishment, no doubt fearing a trap.”

“I am pleased to see that there are men of red blood still living in this decayed and unspirited age!”

Father listened silently and nodded slowly. “Your words confirm that you willed the outcome of the event your speeches set in motion. All the elements of a charge of sedition to inhumanity are present.”

“I am free born, my family is not in debt to the water-works or air-pump, the power-house nor the mess. I am not indentured. How then can any law presume to rule my lips, when no law can rule my spirit?”

“If men were wise enough not to open doors to monsters, we would need no law to make it unlawful to urge so horrid an act.”

To my surprise, Optimina, his servant woman, spoke up: “Young mistress, hear me. There have been ages, many of them, when the mind-science was much advanced. Men of those happy times lived without the need for law, nor was there a Castellan; nor were men split into high ranks and low, for men served each man zealously, without any need to reward his heirs with dignities. An age like ours is very rare, along all the great aeons since the Pyramid arose, and we await some Dreamer of times past or times to come to recollect the lost sciences of mind-perfection to us. Until then, our Pyramid is divided into high and low, and the high are like the lamps and gongs which call us to quarters; they are the alarms that say where a breach has been made. Your voice, even yours, my lady, must be governed by the law, lest you give out a false alarm, and call brave men to dark and reckless deeds.”

I was aghast for a moment. “Father? Will this crone upbraid me?”

He pursed his lips and sucked his teeth to keep himself from smiling. “She is not high born and may say what she would. Unlike you. And she will speak wise words. Unlike you. Come! I have prepared an encyclical, which you must sign, and give out to the hour-slips, to post in all the hatches of the drinking houses and public rotundas. It reviles your brother and condemns those who aided him. There is little else I can do. We may be able to scrape enough sewage from your name to make you presentable for an alliance of marriage of some sort, perhaps not so grand as once I had hoped.”

I said stiffly: “I will publish no ill of my brother.”

“Come: his rank is gone. Eteocles will take his place, and be my heir.”

“Dawn will come before I sign!”

Father slowly climbed to his feet. He tilted his head toward the door: a circuit must have caught his thought-sending, for the door chimed and opened, and Uncle Creon entered, followed by two legates, Kratos and Bia.

They bowed to him.

Father said, “The girl is reticent. Her crime is Conspiracy to Breach, a deed which threatens the integrity of the Pyramid and the survival of the human race. What is within my power to do?”

Creon said with surprise, “Liege? Surely the crime is accessory, not conspiracy.”

“We are lucky my son had wit enough to upbraid the rioters this foolish girl stirred up and drive his beasts into the Quarantine Chamber: we can still claim he did not bring them fully inside the Last Redoubt. The Chamber is hollowed out from the hundred-yard thick armor plate itself, inside the outer lock but not within the inner; a subtle point of law which might allow us to pardon him, if public sentiment permits. It is a slender thread, and all we have. At the moment, we can call the crime attempted, rather than complete. This will allow me to deflect the full force of the law from my children; but I still need a sufficient penalty for the lesser crime to convince the multitude that my justice is fair. What is within my power?”

Kratos answered, “The ancient practice was to use a mental correction. But the last Soul Glass was shattered six hundred years ago.”

Father said, “Tell me not what I cannot do, but what I can.”

Kratos said, “The penalties affixed to nobles are reduction, humiliation, rationing, abnegation and cloister. Or you may issue a Bill of Attainder, which revokes generation privileges.”

“Gah! You are speaking of my unborn grandchildren. I will not corrupt my own blood. And do not bother to say I can blot her family shield, for that escutcheon is mine own as well. With such a stigma, I would be lucky to wed her to a sewer worker or pamphleteer.”

Bia spoke up. His voice was soft and sinister. “Were she common born, there is branding, marring, and flogging. All are quickly accomplished without drain of public resource.”

“It is not meet that any principle of correction should shape to the making of human signposts of pain for the benefit of others.”

Bia said, “Exulted, your beneficence does you credit, but you stand at the tower-top of a tradition more ancient and bloody than such nice scruples know. The flayed skin of one who attempted to exit the pyramid unprepared still hangs on the inward face the Greater Gate, a horrid warning to all.”

“And the era which did that deed is still reviled for its nearly nightlandish inhumanity. I will not make the memory of our age even darker, by putting the fairer skin of a female beside the hide of a criminal, and mine own daughter. Historians have enough to condemn when comparing our aeon to others.”

Creon said heavily, “Sir, history will recall that few other ages, aside from this, suffered the gene-darkening due to influences from the Quiet City, and few had their mathematicians confirm that the degeneration of the race into abhumanism was already much advanced. Without the eugenics laws, in a mere twenty thousand years, we would have de-evolved into beast-things, and more cities would be deserted than they are: without the hierarchy, we could not enforce the eugenics laws.”

Father turned his ear: “What would you do, brother?”

“You are always too lax, brother.”

Father said, “We dare not use the law to kill. For human to kill human is unheard of in civilized times: an abomination. It will pollute the thought-streams for ninety generations, both consciously and subconsciously, and mar the cycle of incarnation and reincarnation.”

“Then let her be locked in an empty city, without water or victual.”

“Death is not a penalty our laws inflict.”

“But it would not be inflicted! Oh no. It would merely be…” and now Creon smiled his toothy smile, “…allowed. To cut off feed and water is not to execute: it imposes only gentle slumber. She has betrayed the safety of the pyramid. Why should we take extraordinary measures to keep her alive?”

“Impossible,” said father curtly.

Creon did not like being crossed. If father had been able to see the look on Creon’s face at that moment, he would have locked Creon into a dark and empty city on some deserted level, and left him to starve.

45.

I spoke up. “Gentlemen, this little drama no doubt would be convincing to a girl of lesser wit, but I can count. I know my birth-hour. I have been presented, and I have danced, but in the eyes of the law, not for a week do I reach the age of my majority: until then, I am a child. Our laws forbid corruption of the blood, attainder, reduction, or abnegation for those of tender years, and certainly our law holds children free from threat to life and limb.”

Creon said, “As a child, the law permits your father to beat you with a rod, provided only he breaks no bones.”

I tossed back my head, and glared up at his eye. “The hour-slips will be eager for the details of his cruelty!”

(It was still distracting to toss my head defiantly and not feel hair slap against my neck. I was not used to it. It made me realize how often I made that head gesture. Maybe it is not one a grown woman should make.)

Creon’s lips drew back from his teeth. He said in a tone of sinister patience, “Countless millions of men live in this huge hive: we cannot control them unless they bow. They will not bow if we seem weak. If you break with us, we seem divided, hence weak. So, right or wrong, you cannot be seen to defy our family in public. It will convulse the Pyrtaneum, and undo all the life’s work of your family.”

I said archly: “Is that so, uncle? Then do not cross me.”

Father whispered something to Optimina. Her voice was louder than his, and I heard her reply, “Her expression is much like your own, lord. She means to have her will.”

I said sharply, “By Creon’s logic, you all must support my brother, and close ranks around him. It is Creon who says any breach within our ranks will shake the public order.”

Father raised his hand, saying, “Enough sophistry. You know the many pains and punishments, either in my public office as your liege, or in my private office as your father, that are in my hand to deal to you: yet your seal upon this encyclical will obviate such need. Surely the reputation and honor of our family, the highest of all high families, weighs heavily on you.”

“My brother is of blood as ancient as my own,” I said. “He is a hero who survived a dark land no one in this chamber, no one in this city, no one in this Great Redoubt, was bold enough to tread. He brought back the cruelest beasts of the Night Land fawning and crawling at his foot. You should erect a monument in the Agora taller than the figure of Andros!”

“Daughter, give way in this, or I must punish you. Come! Your seal upon the document, that all high-born may with one voice condemn those who venture Out, and censure dreams of ancient heroism left better dead beneath dead years.”

I was appalled. For a moment I could not speak. Then: “Will you take back your word? You assented to the expedition. You lauded the young men who donned the heavy armor and charged their great weapons, and you blessed them as they crept softly from our gates into the icy gloom. Did you not also yearn to discover if the ancient lore was sound, that there might be a Place of Refuge, an escape from the Night Lands, some place away to the west, beyond the Land of Abhumans, beyond the lidless eyes of the Watching Things? Have you never wondered where rests the terminus of the great highway that crosses so near the base of our Redoubt? Polynices says that humans built it, in times past. The Last Redoubt must praise those who discover this mystery, and add to the sum of the wisdom of Mankind. You know this, Father: you said it. Your word condoned the expedition!”

He shook his head sadly. “You know Polynices has gone far beyond anything I allowed or dreamt. For the remaining four million years of history, the only thing children will remember of our age, when all else is smothered beneath the pile of time, is that this era allowed two Night-Hounds inside the armor.”

“But you sent him Out, he and his men, calling them heroes!”

“That word I spoke then was fit for then.” He said heavily, “Then is the past, and now is the present. Now another word we all must speak.”

I said, “Am I the daughter of a Castellan, or only of a politician?”

Creon growled, “Liege, time flees us. Let her be half-rationed: the hour-slips will only report with glee that a rich daughter of the aerie lofts must eat a poor man’s meal.”

Father nodded a slow, heavy nod, his face not pointed toward any of us in particular, his pale and filmy eyes seeming more blank than usual.

Bia stepped to the door of the chamber, and whispered to a clerk, who ran off.

Father’s shoulder slumped, and his frame seemed to shrink in on himself. “It will not matter. This is all farce; this is all vanity. Even if my daughter and all the ghosts of the sunlight days were to dance from deck to deck, singing the chorus of condemnation with voices like thunder, and waving white banners of silk and red, faces painted like demogorgons, it would not sway the Populists. The world can never forgive what has been done. The Optimate party is finished, our phylum is finished, our family is done. Authority and rule slip from my fingers like a lump of the drinking powder exposed to air: it fizzes instantly to liquid, and no fist can grasp it. It will mean the end of the Bloodline Laws. The degenerations of the race resume.”

Kratos said softly, “Despair not, my Liege! Even the common-born know the need to excise the diseases Outer Forces have introduced into our gene plasm. No mother yearns for an unworthy child, large-toothed, small-skulled, and dark with hair!”

A look of regret crossed the face of Kratos as this last word escaped him, and I saw the glance of apprehension he darted, first at me, and at my lustrous dark hair, so unlike the fair hair of those not of my house, and then at my father.

This was the first time I realized what must have been obvious to my brothers and my sister, all this life.

They thought we were atavisms. Throw-backs. Lesser beings. The envy of those who had no blood of Mirdath in their veins convinced them that we were archaic; that we were not just of the second race of man, but of a lesser race. No doubt this comforted them when they resented our rule.

Another thing my father did not see was Uncle Creon nod toward Kratos, a mere tilt of the eyes, a small motion of the fingers, which told Kratos not to worry. It was a look of camaraderie, a look of agreement.

Creon’s words had double meaning when he said, “The rule of the family of Andros will not fail. The Bloodline Laws will be upheld: the people see the need for them. The human race will not commit suicide. It is human instinct to follow self interest.”

Father spoke in the most sad and hollow voice I have ever heard come from a human throat. All his years of bearing the burden of the Castellanship, his hidden fears, seemed to speak in that moment, and his words came slowly forth, strangely monotonous: “No, brother! How little you know of the instincts of man. We will embrace suicide so willingly, when we die for love. The young maid thinks nothing of her grandchildren’s genes when her unworthy suitor calls. Mobs go mad when some demagogue arises, promising them revenge against their betters, adoring him; and this is love as well. Men will love anything to which they put their hands: even my son loves the monsters that slay us, and he becomes a monster himself, his thoughts and dreams drifting ever further from the human norm; even my daughter loves him loyally, despite what Polynices has become. The rulers and the people actually salutary to us, wholesome, wise and good, those we do not love, but scorn. Such is human instinct, brother: we are unnatural creatures.”

Creon said only: “Not so, sir. Brother-love is the firmest of sentiments.”

I had a woebegone look on my face at that moment, hearing Father’s toneless voice. If Optimina had only told him what I looked like then, things would have gone differently. I was opening my mouth to speak, when the Registrar (who had entered the chamber with the log book in his hand, and the master seal) asked Father what name to put on the order for my reduction in rations.

“Name?”

“Your daughter’s name, sir? Her adult name.”

This stirred him from his woe: his expression grew hard and cold. “Let her be called Antigone, for she opposes her family and her bloodline, and acts always against her birth.”

I suppose if Optimina had looked at my face then, she would have seen a look of brittle pride mirroring that which shone from my Father’s face.

Païs would have asked forgiveness and tried to make amends.

Antigone never would.

Horrid name. I must carry it henceforth until I die.

46.

It was Creon, not long after, who finally convinced father to visit the prison of his son, and to see close at hand the two monsters he had brought in with him. The watchmen were dismissed, or so I later heard, and only Creon’s partisans, men whose faces Father never saw, whose hearts he never knew, were in the steel-floored quarantine area with Polynices and his two Night-Hounds.

The story of how it was that father and his maid were destroyed, and yet Creon and his heavily armed men escaped unhurt, was never convincing to me.

47.

The popular opinion swung to support Creon once he announced the abolition of the indenture debt. The public treasury was drained, and the lowest of the low born, armed with staves and cudgels, now cheered for Creon whenever he appeared, and set upon any noble or his entourage who opposed Creon in the Pyrtaneum.

There were tumults, and the Architects shut down power and lights to cities up in arms. Doors were locked and air turned stale while angry parties negotiated surrenders, and Adepts with the few working Mind Glasses we still had confirmed their oaths and scanned for mental reservations.

Even the Master Monstruwacan was harassed when he emerged from his high tower, though as the bravoes closed in on him with ugly words and gestures, he drew himself up and spoke the Master Word. The young men remembered their humanity, and fell back, ashamed and astonished, and the Master Monstruwacan gathered his robes of office around him, and walked from between them, not hurrying.

Perhaps such things had happened when my father seized the command, during the food emergencies of so many years ago. I had not been born, and the only accounts I knew of such things came from the witness of flatterers, from accounts courtiers loyal to him told.

How little I knew of him! Now, when it was too late, far too late, did I wonder. He could have answered with a word, had I ever spoken to him as a daughter should do; answers now forever lost to me.

What had he been in youth? Did Father unleash rioters, and use the hunger of the needy to wrestle high command away from Laius his father, and seize supreme eminence for himself? If so, it was a ghastly deed. A mob is a monster, as hungry as a Night-Hound, destructive and wanton and without a soul.

How like Polynices he was after all.

48.

During the time of the tumults, I stole from my chambers, and crept down the long, cold deserted stairs of the Main Flight to the Archivists Quarters. The Pyrtaneum was dissolved, and the Tribunes were arrested, and so no one knew who or what was in charge. The Master of the Library, Aristophanes, was willing to help me, or, I should say, fearful not to help me, not knowing how high my position might be, once the fighting ended.

In the archive, in an insulated cabinet an apprentice opened for me, I inspected the Time Glass which had been focused on the chamber where my father died, its penetrating rays reaching back to the hour in question. There were two Chronometricians present to work the glass, which even I was not permitted to touch.

49.

The image in the surface of the glass is blurred and smoky, as is often the case when weapons powered by the Earth-Current are discharged in a confined space. Only a few clear images are preserved in the smoky glass. One is the image of my brother Polynices, a stern look on his face, putting out his hand and calling the two monsters to his heel. The vast and ungainly Night-Hounds fell back, their jaws awash with human blood, their eyes like coals from a grate, but they crouched behind Polynices.

The image shows Creon and his men at the chamber door, each man with a glittering Diskos in his gauntlet, the spinning blades held out left and right, the butts of the weapons grounded against the deck, the shafts fully extended, the whole squad ready to receive a charge. What words they exchanged, the glass could not record.

The blur on the floor is surely the corpse of my father. Mercifully, all the details are indistinct. One shadow could be a spray of blood, or it could be his torn cloak, or perhaps his hand, held at an odd angle, fingers spread.

The last clear image, from a minute later, and blurred somewhat with the others, shows Polynices stepping forward, his face set and grim, and his monsters looming up flanking him, rising to their feet and opening their great mouths; and before them is the silhouette of Creon cringing, and his men falling away to the left and right. The was a flash of weapons as the men spun their Diskos blades up to speed, and the image reconstructed in the glass again turns into a mass of blurs.

That last image, though, one half-second before the shadows swallow all, is a haunting one, and I asked the prentices to trifle the glass by increments slowly back and forth to study it.

Polynices, arms spread and slightly raised, rests one hand lightly on the manes of each of his monsters as the three step forward. His beasts flank him. Their vast force is under his control. He looks so proud of them, so pleased, so in love.

He does not look down as he steps over the body of our father.

50.

Later, I heard that he had walked his monsters to the gate, and thrust them forth. The Monstruwacans objected, demanding that the monsters be slain and studied, but Polynices was the son of the Castellan, and even the Watchmen feared his high rank; and so, against the ancient practices, on his authority alone, the gate was opened.

I never heard the complete tale. The Watchmen came to blows among themselves, those who respect the old laws were fewer than the young men who feared that Polynices would soon be Castellan, and hold untrammeled power over their lives.

Perhaps they were right to fear, though they feared the wrong man. Upon his ascension, Creon exiled all those who did Polynices any good turn to the worse levels of the plantations and mines beneath us; and he exiled those who stood for the law as well, not liking men man enough to defy the blood of Andros. All the witnesses of the gate-breaking were scattered and frightened beyond my efforts to find them.

To open the gate without the procedures is the stuff of nightmares. It is how the Lesser Redoubt was destroyed. No one will speak of what happened.

I do know that Polynices walked unarmored across the Night Land soil, protected by nothing but his savage monsters. A million people watched him from the embrasures. He went not far: to the White Circle; and he came back without the Hounds.

But he had not been Prepared, and the Watch should have not permitted him to depart.

Had he been a man of common birth, they would have recalled their oaths, and stopped him. It was only a matter of a few minutes, a quarter hour at most, but when I heard the news, I knew that our age was as corrupt and degenerate as the Foretellers warn; and I secretly wondered, even I, when the Messenger of Time would be born to correct us.

Once inside again, Polynices surrendered to the Officer of the Watch, who bound him to the magistrate. The penalty was attainder: he was rendered sterile, unable even to adopt. The magistrate’s written opinion was circulated. His reasoning was that any child of Polynices would be honor-bound to esteem his ancestor’s name, and hence would defy, in his heart at first, but surely later openly, our strictest law and prohibition, the rule of quarantine. The idea that any son of Polynices, any child of the House of Andros, would be so callous as to disregard his father’s name and fame, of course, was not contemplated.

Creon issued penalties more severe, including degradation of the family shield, and namelessness, and every humiliation our laws allow, but he suspended them upon Polynices’ sworn parole to live simply, without bringing further shame to family or phylum.

Polynices swore to have no further traffic with the Night-Hounds, and no further dreams of a day when men domesticated hounds or rode the backs of monsters with the bodies of Centaurs and the heads of Gandharvas.

51.

I visited Polynices not long after Creon had been exulted to the post of Castellan by the unanimous accord of the Pyrtaneum, or at least, the accord of those not bound under house-arrest. I recall how the Proctors, wearing halsberges and morions, stood at every cross-corridor and stair landing, blinking in the light, since the lanterns had only been restored that hour, after so many hours of dark.

A gaunt archivist named Triptolemus, who was no friend of Creon, invited me to walk with him. Triptolemus is lame, and leans upon a long white staff, and his eyes have grown dim over the years peering at twisted and uncertain shapes capering near smokeholes in the Night Lands. Around his neck he wears the silver chain of a Foreteller, for his dreams have been rated in the Acme or Elite grade by the Fate House.

He wore, for once, the dun long coat of the Monstruwacans. It is his right, for the Archivists are a collateral branch of that order, but I had never seen him dressed formally before. He had a squad of the Watch with him, which is also his right, for the Watch are vowed to protect the Monstruwacans as they travel to their tower. Triptolemus smiled and told me that his route to the tower, in this case, would be circuitous, and would happen to parallel my path.

These escorts were enormous in solid gray armor and dark unadorned helm, and in each gauntlet, trembling with unseen Earth-Current, was a huge Diskos weapon, whose terrible blade, when it spins, when it falls, cannot be parried. Their heated gray-black cloaks are like the dark wings of birds from some children’s book, and make them seem even more broad of shoulder than their shoulder-plates.

The corridors were empty of sound and motion. All others kept to their cabins.

The Proctors, who seemed slight as children compared to the Watchmen in their heavy armor, were polite enough when we came to the valves leading to my sister Ismene’s quarters. The Proctors kept their pikes in hand, and the blades were live, but they spoke softly, and they let us pass without challenge.

52.

I found my brother in the Renunciation chamber, a wide space paneled in brown and gold of soothing hues, and barren, except for a wall screen luminous with a mandala of figures, standing before emotion-absorbing curtains of deep maroon. The mandala screen was rich with images from the elder days of the world: suns, moons, bearded stars, rivers of milk, birds, white clouds and other mythical and imaginary figures.

The meditation mat is supposed to recline on the floor, so the Penitent can lie prone, with the energy centers of his nervous system aligned with the nodes of subtle Earth-Current woven into the mat-fibers. Polynices had the mat propped on the wall. It was folded and expanded slightly, so that the pattern of nodes looked like the hulking silhouette of an abhuman. The surface was streaked and scarred, as if long straight stokes of forceful blows had been delivered against the mat. I noticed these wounds were clustered around the shoulders, neck, chest and groin of the silhouette: killing blows, expertly delivered.

Here was Polynices, leaning languidly on the floor. He had torn the emotion-absorbing curtains down from their rings, and balled them up under his armpit to use as a pillow. In one hand a crystal cup for wine, which he drank neat, without water. A half-empty carafe was near his foot. He had taken the junction rod out from the mandala screen, so the images were dull both to eye and to spirit, and he held it lightly in one hand. I could see where his fingerprints had darkened it. He had been gripping it two-handed, as the haft of Diskos would be grasped by a man of the Watch; or by that rare hero who, of all his generation, survived a venture abroad in the Night Lands.

I said carefully, “So…. You have not renounced?”

He made a noise of contempt in his nose, and flicked his finger against the rim of his wine cup. The cup was made of that type of crystal that can play simple songs when disturbed. This one was a child’s lullaby, filled with old and charming nonsense words whose meaning even paleo-philologists cannot recall:

Springtime is green, little baby; Summer is gold; Autumn is gray, little baby, Winter is cold….

He said, “Ismene says I must find some other task for my life, some work with which the Lectors will find no fault. She recommends I study in the local Infirmary, don the Robe, and become a Rasophore.”

I said, “She said the same to me: Ismene allowed me to see you only on the condition that I urge you to take up the burden of your life again.”

He flicked his finger against the cup.

Day follows Night, little baby; Night follows Day; Everything fine, little baby, passes away….

I said, “Father is dead. You should be the Castellan.”

“All say I slew him. My dogs.”

“You mean your Night-Hounds.”

Flick. Everything foul, little baby, will fail in time too; Bright Day will come, little baby, when Dark Night is through…

“Did you?” I said.

He said, “Draego and Dracaina were startled by something. She threw herself between Father and Draego, trying to protect him. Creon and his men assumed ranks and brandished, but they did nothing. Nothing. So Creon did not precisely slaughter Father, but he … allowed … it to happen. I have never seen my dogs so enraged against each other. She was trying to rip out his throat. If they did not love me, they would not have stopped at my word. I have a special word I use to hold them in check. I call it my Master Word.” He made a throaty call, like a word without consonants:aeaeae!

I let that little blasphemy pass by in silence. I said: “Why didn’t you tell the magistrates what happened?”

“Creon’s magistrates?”

He flicked his finger against the cup again, harder this time, and the cup chimed as if it would break.

Hush and be still, little baby; Night Haunts will hear; Die we all will, little baby, when Night Haunts come near….

Annoying. I was beginning to realize why our sister Ismene was so frayed and nervous these days.

He heaved a deep sigh. “I do not know what provoked Draego. I suspect one of Creon’s men stung him with a dagger point. And everything was going so well up until then! They were talking, Father and Creon, about letting me free from that room, restoring me in the eyes of the people; they spoke of how the hour-slips could be made to carry the tale as we wished it told. Like the old times.”

I said, “If not the magistrate, someone could be told of Creon’s treachery. The Pyrtaneum. The Orders. The Contemplatives. The Guilds. Surely I am not the only one suspicious that all the men were sent from the room save Creon’s partisans. Do you recall how I was arrested after you were saved from the Night Lands? Creon blamed the riot on me, and told father I stirred up the common people to bludgeon the Watch and break open the Gate for you. But I think Creon set his men to do the work, to bring the monsters in, telling them to claim my words inspired the deed. He breached the walls, not us, that father might die and we two be blamed. Creon is behind this all. He needed only get father alone in the room with your beasts!”

He grimaced. “An intricate theory; but it does not fit the facts.”

“It explains all!”

“Father, not Uncle Creon, sent everyone from the room. They wanted to talk to me about secret matters. Things lesser men would call treason. Creon said it was the only way to restore our family to honor, and to preserve our memory for later ages. The pneumaticists aver we are reborn again and again. Father does not wish, in his next incarnation some million years hence, to be reading historians who write nothing but denunciations of these times.”

He paused to laugh a bitter laugh.

Flick. When the Wheel turns, little baby, we cannot flee; the dagger for you, little baby, the capsule for me….

He said: “Have you ever thought how hopeless the Returns will be? All father’s critics will be reborn as well, you see, perhaps reborn as the very lecturers teaching him of the profanity and madness for which our period will be remembered. Thanks to me.”

“What profanity? What madness?”

“That is what Father called it. My plan. The thing we were discussing, which made father send the Watch away. He said that our family would be lost from fame and power if we did not support my plan, even though he hated it. I was going to go Out once more, and use Draego and Dracaina to capture a third Night-Hound whelp; and then four and five and more. Enough to make a breeding stock. Enough to make, in one generation or two, a hound pack equal to an army. They breed quickly. So quickly! Human life seems so weak and pale compared to what stalks the night!”

He flicked his finger: Hush and be still, little baby; no need for tears; Love binds us still, little baby, no matter the years….

“We were talking about what level of the pyramid, which abandoned city to use. We thought of Ventral Southwest Nine: you would only need to armor over four gateways to shut the place off. Father seemed to think the architects had detected life-essences, perhaps from some long-forgotten grain-store, still active scattered through the empty houses and barren parklands there, but Creon was sure the place was bare. Father hated my idea of breeding Hounds, you see; but public opinion left him no choice. Only if I turned out to be right, only if my dream of domestication of the monsters was proved true, would our bloodline be heroic, rather than accursed. Only if we had a hundred lads each with his own pack of Hounds, and if they slew a thousand giants. We could take back some of the outer buildings and towers, the Quiet City, the Dark Palace, or the Temple of the Masks.”

We were both silent for a moment, thinking each our gloomy thoughts.

He said, “Humans built them, you know. They were not always the haunt of abominations. I do not care what the Monstruwacans can prove with their science. My dreams say humans built them.”

We were silent another moment.

Eventually I said, “If you found some path leading to the Place of Refuge, surely this will revive our honor. You must have found something!”

“No one told you?”

“I am surrounded by courtiers. I am told only lies.”

“Some things they say are true.”

“They said you found nothing. It must be a lie.”

“Must it be?”

“What did you find?”

He said, “Ice. Ice and darkness.”

He moved his finger. The little cup sang: Nor Death nor Rebirth, my beloved; nor all the Night long, will keep us apart, little baby: for Love is so strong!

“Beyond the encampments of the abhumans, the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk climbs a long, slow slope of dark ice. Beneath the ice is hard igneous rock, showing that volcanoes flowed there perhaps a million years ago, perhaps more. There are no smoke-holes, no firepits, no light at all. Mile upon weary mile it goes. The air grows ever thinner and colder as the slope climbs. Even the strong men in my band where killed by that cold, so bitter was it, and our cloaks and our disciplines were no match for it. We walked for weeks, perhaps two months, breathing with our air-goblets held over our noses. There is nothing there. Not even the Night-Hounds can tolerate it. Whenever we felt that pressure in our souls which told us a Silent One was approaching, we would throw us from the road into the snow to either side, and lay without motion until the dread and potent creature had passed by. Each time, one less man could find his feet again. Eventually we turned back.”

He wiped at his tears, grimacing. Then he said softly:

“Elagabalus, before he bit his capsule, said he saw a Dark Redoubt, as large as our own, but occupied all with Silent Ones rather than human life. At the end of the road, miles and miles ahead of us. But we were in darkness, utter darkness. He whispered to me that he had done something to his eyes to make them able to see despite the dark. Made them better, he said. I touched his face and put my finger in his empty eyesockets. That was when I noticed that two of our men, the ones pressed up against my shoulders to either side (for we huddled together for warmth) were no longer warm. Both had stopped breathing. I jumped back from them, and they were no longer in arm’s reach, and so I lost them. But I heard their footsteps continued forward in the darkness, on that road which leads to nothing. They marched and did not stop.

“I turned the rest of the men back, but not in time to save us.

“By the time we descended to warmer lands, and came within sight of the Great Redoubt in the far distance again, the abhumans had been warned, and were waiting.

“There were only nine of us left by the time we found a place to hide on the shore of a lake of salty poison. When those nine were dead, I used their bloated corpses as a raft, and the bodies were buoyant in that thick, mineral fluid. The abhumans on the shore could not follow. I built my hut of bricks of ice on a small atoll in the middle of that lake of poison.

“There I found my Hounds. They saved my life, you know. I could not have made it back through the leaguer of the abhumans, had they not scouted the terrain for me, killed the guards, slain the giants. And now they sit outside, crying for me. When I sleep, I hear them, you know. In my sleep.”

Flick. We shall live again, my beloved, for such is my song!

That was the last time I saw him alive.

53.

Of course, I suppose I saw him alive several times after this, but seeing a magnified image of someone through the glass floor of the Viewing Chamber is not the same.

There were thousands of us gathered just from this level, and millions watching through similar Viewing Tables in all the cities of mankind on every inhabited deck. My seat was a privileged one, nearest the surface of the glass, and my neighbors were gathered row upon row in seats above and around me.

His escape was remarkable: he trod out into the gloom, head held high, making no attempt to hide or slink or crawl from rock to rock. The Dun Giants who are encamped so near our gates could be seen in the Viewing Table, hulking shadows against the shadows of broken rock, glaring in surprise at his boldness, and gesturing hugely with their arms to bring their brothers leaping quickly from rock to rock, gathering around him. How small he was next to them.

They gathered from the left and right, readying an ambuscade. The heaviest of the giants came loping out from the tall rocks to bar my brother’s path, and flourished high his truncheon, grinning with mirth. The man-creature’s tusks wet with drool, no doubt at the thought of feasting on man-flesh, and the piggish face was lit up with a strangely innocent glee, and the grisly mouth was wide and smiling.

Two huge wolflike shapes came lumbering out of the gloom. Draego hamstrung the giant, and Dracaina tore out his throat as he fell, all in one swift and well-practiced move.

When the next of the giants lunged, Draego’s monster teeth closed on an arm as thick as a tree-limb, but now it was Polynices who moved. His lit his weapon and swung the wheel-blade through the soft part of the giant’s neck with an expert stroke, the blade-lightning illuminating the night for just that moment. The coordination as they fought was as strange as the figures of a dance: each knew where the other would be. All three, Polynices, and his two horrific beasts, moved as one.

They slew many giants, and many more ran away.

There was no feat of arms in living memory to equal this, not for three generations of man.

There was utter silence in the auditorium as we watched, thousands of us, and even the hawkers selling beer and smelling salts were voiceless with awe.

In the image in the Viewing Table, we saw the Night-Hounds raise their red mussels toward the smoldering clouds of heaven. A moment later, through some high windows in the northeastern wall of the Pyramid, very dimly, we heard the cry of the Night-Hounds, yowling their victory.

54.

Over the next week, off and on, I watched my brother as he fared across the Night Lands with his two monsters. He had brought out from the Pyramid a pack of food tablets, which he fed them.

The abhumans are the most like us of all the creatures of the Darkness, and, after being abroad seventy hours, Polynices came across a little hut of them, a bull, his mate and three sprats. The hut consisted of hides stretched across a framework of dried worm bones, placed like an upturned cup across the mouth of a smokehole, to gather in the heat and light. Polynices slew the creatures with his Diskos, and his Night-Hounds ate their bodies. He lodged himself and his pets in their home.

Ismene says she saw him chewing flesh from the dead abhumans also, which is a sign that he had forgotten part of his human nature, and lost the Master Word. I saw him reach down and examine the bodies with his knife, but he could have been putting his hand to his mouth for any number of other reasons.

55.

Polynices was often missing from the view table, as the operator of the lenses could find no clue of his hiding places, for the gray armor is meant to blend into the dark landscape. But when the Monstruwacans in their tower detected the discharge of Earth-Current, they would send the dial-numbers of their elevation and right track to the Viewers, who would train their arrangements of lenses on the area so identified, and sweep back and forth, seeking.

I was sleeping when the news came that the Slowly Turning Wheel had appeared out of the North, and the black mists parted around it as it advanced.

I ran from my chambers, still in my nightdress, down the many steps of the East-Northeast Stair to find the Viewing Table Chamber. Red light from the windows beat against the stairway as I ran, for the Night Land was stirring: the eerie whistle of the Sundering Worm, the deep strange voice of the Thing That Nods, and the roaring of brutes and the hooting of giants all rose in a nightmare clamor. The wild noise of hammers striking anvils issued from the underground holes to the south, as a sound of rage or celebration, and mocking laughter yammered from the smoke-filled valleys to the south-west.

A shrill, fell cry sounded from one of the windowless mile-high Towers which rise to the West of the Last Redoubt, and my spirit trembled, for I could feel the disturbance in the aether which followed that cry. Through the windows, looking up, I beheld massive splashes of red light beat against those slightly tilted towers of black metal.

Then I heard from all the windows, louder than any trumpet, the Home-Call, that great and mighty noise sent by the Monstruwacans to warn Polynices of a danger nigh to him. The sound was deafening. It overwhelmed the shrieks of the Night Land.

Beware; beware!

Again it sounded, and again.

Return, O thou Lost! Follow my Call and Return!

Slowly, the armored plates began to rise up across the windows, and the whisper of the Air-Clog began to make that deep hum which it only makes in time of grave danger. It meant that a Great Power, one of the Ulterior Beings, was abroad in the Night.

With a clang, the window armor fell across the scene, and the reddish light of eruption was shut out.

The Home-Call fell silent a minute or two before I reached the floor where the Viewing Table Chamber lay.

I ran down the corridors toward the Chamber, an endless time of running, silence all around me.

I am of the blood of Mirdath. I could feel the disturbance in the night as the prayers and hopes of the Millions in the Last Redoubt reached out across the Night Land toward some horrid danger facing Polynices. My legs moved as if in a slow dream, and I knew I had seen all this in a dream before; my eyes were blinded with salt tears, for I knew the ending of the dream.

I arrived at the doors leading to the Viewing Chamber when I felt the hope shatter and die in the air around me. Through the doors shut tight before me, I heard a great multitude of people all call out at once, a noise of breathless terror and woe.

Then, silence. I threw my shoulder to the door before the footman could open it for me.

My sister was already kneeling on the glass floor far below, weeping. Other women of my household had their veils across their faces.

And dimly, through the windows, I could hear the cry of the Night-Hounds, lamenting their fallen master.

56.

Ismene told me later he had been traveling north, nigh to the Hound of Silence, for there was a nest of Night-Hounds there whose mother had been killed by a blood-drinker. He was seeking the whelps.

57.

After my brother’s death, it became my habit to pay calls on Triptolemus the Foreteller. Under the austerity rules of his Order, he is not allowed to serve lavish entertainments, and so he was one of the few acquaintances from Father’s reign I could call upon without embarrassment to either of us. If a noble fed me according to my rank, this might be seen as a criticism of Creon, or showing support for the old regime: such slights are remembered when a man presents his son for elevation, or commendation to the Orders, or the Watch; under Creon’s rule, such slights were also remembered when magistrates convened in secret to draw up lists of infractions against the public discipline. Triptolemus was immune from such considerations.

He would often welcome me with a loaf and a carafe of heavily watered wine, but it was no better and no worse than what he fed himself.

We sat in his cabin which overlooks the Mad Library, where books whose thought-images are no longer sane are kept. Here were stacks of insulated cases, sandwiched between panels of meditative cork to mute the aether-noise. Whenever a scholar picked up one of the mad books with a pair of insulated tongs, the recorded voices would cry out, threatening or pleading, books begging to be read, promising forbidden knowledge.

It sounded so much like one of the Mountains in the Night Land, that I was amazed anyone could dwell in this chamber, much less come here to study. But much of the ancient learning is lost, and there is always a scholar optimistic that a coherent account can be pieced together from the scattered jumble of ruined books.

He would shut the grate and block the noise and mind-noise while we spoke.

We talked of many light things, and some grave things. Once we spoke of Polynices.

I cannot name the watch or week when this was. Before, I was merely entertaining the notion of saving my brother; after this conversation, the purpose had hardened as if by alchemy into adamant.

It started with a question, which I uttered idly. The barrier of the Air-Clog reaches all the way to the Electric Circle surrounding the base of the Great Redoubt to sheath its utmost tower. The aether-force from the Circle is alleged to repel all unclean spirits, and even the mightiest of the Nameless Ones is unable to cross it. How had Polynices gotten his Night-Hounds across it, either going in or coming out?

Triptolemus frowned and did not speak for many a minute. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. But then he stirred and spoke.

“Like all secrets, the key is terrible and simple,” said Triptolemus, “Though the Master Monstruwacan would have forbidden your brother egress had he known your brother knew it. I can only assume your brother deduced during the long months while he was Out. Naturally, I can tell it to you, a woman.”

I said, perhaps a little stiffly, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the pool of candidates for proposed ventures would double. We have yet to discover what the creature is who comes to stand near the Great South Watcher, although his tracks are plain where he crosses the Road; the near side of the Deep Red Pit has never been glimpsed, despite that it is so close. Perhaps there is a city there, perhaps not; we cannot tell merely from the thickness and composition of the smoke which rises up, whether it is chimney smoke from furnaces. A woman could skulk to the edge of the Pit and look down as easily as a man.”

He said, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the Pyramid would fall in a generation. They need only capture one, and breed from her a hybrid who can speak the Master Word, and our firmest defenses are negated at that one stroke.”

I said impatiently, “An old and wearisome excuse! Thousands or tens of thousands of women were captured surely when the Lesser Redoubt fell, a million years ago.”

“Perhaps their menfolk were mindful enough to slay them before they were Destroyed. In any case, an era when our population numbers dwindle is not an era where such talk as this is wise. Wives have duties more pressing than to make their children orphans.”

“It takes no great strength to fire an harquebus.”

He shook his head with sorrow. “Weapons that smite at a distance are an unwise innovation to our times! They should never have been reinvented. Such discharges draw with disproportionate swiftness the greater, older, and more cunning of the foes that slay us. It was your ancestor, Andros, whose bad example resurrected the ancient folly of tele-bellipotent weapons. The Monstruwacans sent discharges of Earth-Current rolling down the side of the Pyramid to slay his pursuers, killing many of them while they were yet afar off. After this, for years, men said, why not have a smaller instrument to do the same? Will it matter if the Older Powers are stirred up by their discharge, since they already bring their full force to bear against the Great Redoubt? So it was argued. Folly! There were many periods in history when the Redoubt was not pressed so close as this, when armed giants build encampments within half a mile off our doors and posterns. The Night Land has seethed with anger for a million years, and the choleric energy levels are higher than other eras have known. They are certain to try some desperate, telling stroke against us, and we have stirred them up to it. It is only a matter of time before someone insists it is wise to take an harquebus outside, using it not for defense of our walls only.”

I thought it best not to mention, at that moment, my desire to equip myself with an harquebus and travel Out.

He shook his head, his dim eyes focused on nothing. With a thin hand he clutched the Foretelling chain around his neck, the symbol of his talent.

58.

“Creon promises a return to the old ways, and the condemnation of such weapons. He is lying—I can sense such things, as can anyone who knows how to focus a Mind Glass—but I urged the masters of our order to acclaim for him nonetheless. Because the truth escapes his lips, whether he knows it or not. The old ways will return.

“Do you know how long we have been deviant from the ancient and established practices of our ancestors? Six hundred years, if one counts from the time of the mutation riots in Courtstairwell, when the last Soul Glass was shattered; less than that, if you count from the time when the other cities adopted the New Regulations, and the multitudes cried out for a Castellan to govern us, rather than sages, using arms rather than words to chastise the scofflaw.

“Six hundred years is nothing. Some say the Pyramid is Six Million years old; some say Nine Million. Our way of life, our violence, our intrigues, our endless fear of race-degeneration, our licensing of marriages and undue pride in bloodline, and all restless yearning which drives young women to impersonate the deeds of young men, and a young man to impersonate the deeds of a Night Huntsman, all this is the trifle of a single second, an eyeblink, a sneeze, in an otherwise healthy and wholesome people.

“It will not be long before the fit will pass. I have seen it. Someone will come for our age, a Messenger of Time, even as Andros came in his age to tell the despairing peoples of the Last Redoubt that the myths of the sunlit elder world were true, and to describe the beasts and men of those times, and say the meaning of ancient words whose use had been forgotten. He was sent to put the heart in them, and to save the last of the Lesser Redoubt.

“I have seen it. Someone will come, either from the past or the future, and be born among us as a child, but will remember the mind-sciences we have forgotten, and banish madness and ambition from us once again. And in that time, we will follow the perfect ways each of us from love and duty, without any need for Castellans to tell us right and wrong. It will be soon, such a one shall be born, and he will cast for us a Soul Glass, for deep as well as surface thoughts, and teach us the art of its making.

“Creon’s falsehoods will be made the truth then, and all the forbidden weapons will be returned to locked museums, and foolish gene tampering and breeding for the Night Hearing will be condemned. And young women will stop dreaming of how to be more manly than young men.”

59.

“Breeding? Did you say, breeding for the Night Hearing?”

“The Eugenicist College does not seek merely to weed out the unfit. They think that talents such as mine are carried in the blood rather than in the spirit. For three hundred years, they have been forbidding or assenting to matches based only on such imaginary principles. Fools. As if two artists mating could produce a greater artist! It was this meddling by doctors in olden times which brought these genetic diseases upon us. It was not the Outer Beings.”

Since Triptolemus was the one, in times past, who told me that the Sun of ancient legend was no more than the name for a great searchlight of immense power once used to illuminate the Land back when the Pyramid was newly raised, I am never sure how far to trust these tales of other times.

In any case, I said, “Yet why this slight against all women? The monsters without us are so great, that mere strength cannot prevail against them; and the most dangerous are not made of matter at all, and cannot be smitten with an axe.”

“Young men must test themselves against the Darkness, if they are to retain their masculine nature; and also they can be expended without great loss. Women need not indulge in such extravagant gambles with suicide to maintain their mental health. Nor would I trust the sound-mindedness of menfolk who would expose their mothers, wives and daughters to such dangers: they would be soft men, men without honor, full of self-conceit.”

“Is what is sane for men insane for women? Surely justice requires the law treat all with equal dignity.”

He smiled at that. “Strange words for an aristocrat. If we were utterly sane, no one would venture Out, not ever. There is nothing more the Monstruwacans really need to know. The date of the failure of the Earth Current is calculated: the death of the human race is known, and dreamers of the far future have seen the Last Times. But we are human beings, and so we do mad things, and invent excuses to make ourselves believe that common sense compels us.”

I smiled sweetly at him, though his condescension irked me bitterly: “Since I am a woman, you can tell me the secret. How did Polynices get the Night-Hounds across the Circle?”

He frowned when I spoke my brother’s name, but did not correct me. He had no love for Creon, after all.

“He invited them.”

“Is that all?”

“That is all, young Antigone. All this metal and energy, all these walls and weapons are merely the outer and material form of a spiritual battle, and they are the least important element in that battle. Once we say to the Outer Darkness: come in with me, I welcome you, then all this will not prevail to keep them out. So it is with all things, human or not, which try to eat our souls.”

He advised me to cease my staring from the balconies so steadfastly at the body of my brother: he was sure it was perilous to health and sanity.

I thanked him for his counsel, but did not follow it, of course.

60.

My months of waiting ended when, once, there came a filmy light flickering in the eyepiece of the spyglass, and I put my eye to it.

The Man of Mist was standing on the edge of the little cup of salty soil where my brother lay. I could not tell where its feet were placed, so it might have been anywhere from twenty to forty feet tall. It seemed semi-solid, but a blue radiation shined from its wispy body, stronger at its trailing fingers and those strange streamers from its crown which looked so much like hair. There were three dark spots in its skull, which looked much like human eyes and mouth, if a mouth were wide indeed and hanging open jawlessly.

These entities are rare denizens of the outer miles of the Night Land. None had been seen so close to the Last Redoubt before, all previous sightings had been along the slopes of the glacier land north of the Quiet City; but this one made as if to approach my brother for a second time.

The mist-man bent at the trunk and lowered its skull toward my brother. Its arms and fingers elongated oddly as it reached toward him.

Its shining hands cast a light across my brother’s right side. For a moment, the wheel of his weapon was plainly visible in the spy glass.

Connected to the main housing of the spyglass, a recording plate had been long prepared to receive an image: I hopped down from the stool to throw the little contact lever, and a minuscule trickle of the Earth-Current strengthened the light and the thought-energy gathered by the spy glass, to inscribe the scene onto the surface of the plate.

Haemon, who was watching through the repeater lens, said calmly: “Take a second plate: you will record a strangeness.”

I did as he said, sliding a second plate into the clamp, adjusting the charge, and closing the small brass lever that activated the works.

“What are you seeing?”

Instead of answering, he plucked me up by both elbows as if I were a child and held me before the eyepiece. My tiptoes trembled on the stool.

A dark monster, larger than one of my brother’s mythical dray-horses of the ancient world, came lumbering out of the shadows on the far side of the salt circle. By the light of the Man of Mist, by the tumbling flare of the smoke-hole, I saw the monster clearly, and saw the markings along its huge neck and massive, ugly jaws. It was a Night-Hound, of a breed striped gray and black, with a ruff of uncouth bristles running along its neck and shoulders. Ropes of saliva dripped from pale jaws, and the flesh of the monster was scaly and scabrous in some places, reptilian, but bristly and hairy in others.

The male hounds have a bigger ruff. This was a bitch, Dracaina.

She leapt into the middle part of the Man. I expected her to scatter it, but the Mist Man was solid enough to make her rebound from its chest. It stroked her with a gentle flutter of its long, thin fingers, and her foreleg on that side went out from under her, as if his lightest touch made her numb. As she fell, her teeth closed on the thin and semi-transparent arm. The black spot on its skull that represented its mouth now sagged alarmingly. With a slow, huge motion, the mist-man toppled back, dragged the half-paralyzed Night-Hound with it. The fume from the smoke hole suddenly spurted up, black and thick, and I lost any further clear sight of the fight. I saw a dim light grow brighter and dimmer, as if the two horrors were rolling down some unseen slope away from me, the opaque body of the Night-Hound now above and now below the strange Man of Mist.

My brother’s body had not been disturbed. When the trail of smoke from the hole began to blot out the scene, I saw that the blade of his disk was pale against the black sand, whereas before it had been dark.

I worked the small brass lever to inscribe a final plate before the image was lost to me.

61.

My audience with the Master Monstruwacan was granted. The air in the Tower of Observation is rarefied, even for one who lives in the upper cities: the steward gave me a phial of aerial-water, in case I should grow faint, and also a breathing bell as small and dainty as a rose on a stem, to hold to my nose. A special garment and cap of dun color I must wear to enter the chamber, for the Forces and Powers of the Night Land direct many of their thoughts at the Observers whose watchfulness thwarts them. The fabric is insulated, and the dull hue is thought to make it difficult for the Southwest Watching Thing to count the number of men manning the instruments.

In the very center of the chamber, surrounded by curving armatures like an armillary sphere, was the Great Spy Glass, held some two hundred feet off the surface of the deck. Many ladders climbed up its immense sides, and along the service catwalks and balconies clinging to it were little metal huts, pressurized and insulated, with bunks and mess for off-duty observers. The glass itself was ancient, a hundred yards across, and hung overhead like the full moon of the ancient world. Bus-bars and energy tubes the size of redwoods connected the base of the Great Spy Glass to the deck of the tower, and it was rumored that ancient architects had driven a straight shaft, which appears on no maps or diagrams, directly to the Earth Current crack far below, with dedicated lines leading here, so that, even should all other power fail, the Great Spy Glass would ever be watchful against our terrible foes.

In a circle all around the platform of the Spy Glass was the track and the engine to turn the machine clockwise and counterclockwise. The engine crew were sitting bundled on the dash, huddled near a samovar of steaming drink, looking up now and again at the signal lamps hanging from the small house near the eyepiece of the great glass.

The tower was open in all directions, the view broken only by great pillars to hold up the cupola. The outer surfaces of these pillars did not go to waste, for lesser spyglasses had been built in the hollow areas of their capitals, and lesser versions of those same famous machines that forever watch the foe and guard against surprise.

Microphones and ultraphones as long as the horns of behemoths leaned out from the crowded machicolations; and here were aetherometers in their delicate crystal shells, so sensitive to taint that only technicians vowed to celibacy and temperance could approach them. Magentometers and infravisuals peered from ledges in various directions. Long range thermometers registered the flux both from the body heat of the Great South Watching Thing and the Deliberately Moving Ice. Geometers and hypergeometers detected the trace changes to local disturbances in the plenum of time and space, their needles quaking whenever one of the Doors from the distant Country of Doors That Open made a void of nothingness in mid-darkness. Momosometers tracked the clamor from the Land of the Great Laughter; pneumographs traced the changes in the spirit-pressure; volcanometers registered the changes to underground electrothermal flows, perhaps a sign that the Ungainly Buried Thing was slowly clawing its way to the surface; thanatometers clicked to themselves, measuring the unseen radiations from the Blue Shining Place. The machines are made of black and dull gray metals, as if better to hide their purposes, and their lights and cylinders are dim and muted.

It was the quiet of the place that surprised me. I saw at least five hundred men at their stations. Many were Monstruwacans, but others were technicians and machine-tenders, fulgrators, spiritualists, psychometricians and other experts in the sciences. The Captain of the Watch was here, in full battle armor, with his tall disk-axe in his gauntlet, standing next to the speaking bells, in case messages must be sent at once to the Corps or the Gate. Fuglemen in gray and black stood by the switches and plungers which operated the machinery of the Home Call and the Set Speech, so that, by blasts of sound or floods of light patterns, messages could be sent abroad to any adventurers. Yet of all these gathered here, and more who were resting between their duties in this place, every voice was hushed, every motion was quiet and controlled.

When I stepped from the readying chamber into the Tower of Observation itself, I could see why all talk was hushed in this place.

The five faces of the Great Watching Things that surround our mighty home could all be seen at once from this vantage. The left eye of the Southwest Watcher hung in the shadows of it ungainly silhouette, clearly visible; the proud and impassive gaze of the terrible Great South Watcher; the bell-like ear of the Crowned Watcher; the dark unlit shape of the Northwest Watching Thing, its head still nodded in surprise at the footstep of men from two generations ago; the tall form of the Southeast Watcher, dimly visible by the glare of those strange lights we call the Silver Torches. The Thing That Nods, for the last ten thousand years, had been crouched on a cold hillside not far from the Steaming Vent, and, when my father was young, volcanic action made slender gray-white lights appear in the depth of the Vent, and by that reflected glare, a light caught the edge of the cheek of the Thing That Nods, and the muscles of its muzzle were bunched so that it seemed to be smiling at the Last Redoubt.

To my relief, I saw that my interview with the Master Monstruwacan was not to be held in this vast and silent chamber, watched by the huge and inhuman faces below us in the eternal gloom. With a polite bow, a clerk took me past where two aureneticists in earphones were noting the voice-pattern oscillations in the threats shouted out by the Lesser Upright Speaking Object. The clerk opened a hatch in what I thought was the energy-pile for a long-range thought-gathering instrument. But no, the chamber within was mostly empty space, and the gathering mechanism was dull, all its dials blank. Here the Monstruwacan had set up a presence chamber far more spartan and austere than my uncle’s opulent reception hall: merely a few chairs of insulated metal next to a large glass table. There was a thought-scribing box with caps on extending arms held above the table, for scribes to make notes of what they viewed. No images were projected on the table at the moment, or perhaps it was focused on a part of the Night Land illumined by no smoke holes.

I am afraid my manners, bad as they are, were even worse then, for I was disoriented. My first words were: “That voice! It said my name as I walked by. I wanted to hear—surely such a terrible thing will not come to pass! It was about to say… what was it about to say? Buried alive?”

The Master Monstruwacan was a solidly built man, whose face was so harsh it could have been chipped from an iron block. His hair was cropped so close to his skull, that its iron-gray hue was lost against his flesh tone, which was darker than normal, as if a life of exposure to strange radiations had leeched the color from his flesh. His eyes were the color of a Diskos-weapon, dull and iron-gray.

“That was the nearer and higher-pitched of the two identified sources from the Mountain of the Voice That Speaks. I am sorry you were exposed. You should have a mnemonicist remove the memory when you leave here: otherwise it will give you nightmares. You have studied the dream-defensive arts? Or are noble-born girls excused from that practice these days?”

The condescension in his voice sobered me. I straightened up, and opened my mouth to make some haughty reply, but, as good fortune would have it, his manners were no better than my own, so he interrupted me before I could speak, nodding to a nearby chair, and saying: “Sit! I have little time for this business, but I am required to hear your request for an appeal.”

“You sound like you’ve made up your mind, Master Monstruwacan.”

“Long ago, Castellan’s daughter; but I am giving you these few minutes to change it, if you can.”

“You know the tale of Andros and Mirdath, how she experienced anabiosis when he exposed her body—only apparently dead—to an afflatus from the Earth-Current….”

He held up his broad, thick hand. “I know many tales. You seek to persuade me? I am a man of the night science. Speak to me of facts first, and then give interpretation, theory and persuasive urging after.”

I passed him the plates I had taken from the spyglass.

“Here is an image from nine months ago; here one from nine days ago. This is my brother’s Diskos where it lies on the black sand near his body. Note the chip in the blade of the weapon: in the first image it is near the base of the forks, perhaps at seven o’clock. In the second image it is near the apex of the weapon, at twelve-o’clock. Such is the fact. The interpretation is as clear. Nothing but the life-energy of the wielder can make the Diskos spin. Here it is turning, albeit slowly. The conclusion is that my brother is alive.”

He pushed the plates back toward me. “Not so. The conclusion is merely that some residual of the life-force is draining slowly from the cells of his dead body. The fingernails and hair of a corpse grow after the body dies: this is known to science. Perhaps we are merely seeing such a residuum here. The long-range biometers have been trained on him many periods over the last nine months, and have detected not even the smallest trace of life.”

“Nine months, with no trace of decay….”

“The smokes and fumes of the Night Land some times betray strange preservative properties, and we know of invisible radiations that slay the animalcules which cause natural corruption.”

“But I also have readings here showing warmth still in the body…”

“Perhaps this is heat from the nearby volcanic smokehole.”

“Spectrochemical analysis shows the oxygen to carbon dioxide content changes in the air near that hole. It is consistent with a long period of shallow breathing.”

“It is also consistent with what might be expected near a fire source.”

“We do not know for certain that he is not alive, comatose, but…”

“We know for certain no man should risk his life to bring back another who has fallen in the Night Land! We know from records both ancient and recent that the monsters sometimes allow a corpse to linger unmolested in plain sight, in hopes of luring some child of man forth from our mighty home.”

“Sir! Each bit of evidence alone admits of some second explanation, but the weight of them together indicates a vital force may yet be present. But if there is any chance my brother is merely in a swoon, or clenched by a time-distortion…”

He slapped the surface of the glass table with his palm, a shockingly loud noise in that quiet, enclosed place.

“My judgment was overruled, first, when I advised against your brother venturing forth to seek the Country of Refuge beyond the Place of the Abhumans, which is no more than a silly tale for children; second, when he brought a brace of monsters into the Pyramid, something clean against our most ancient laws, a violation of our quarantines, an abomination. I demanded that your brother bite his Capsule, as was my right to ask. Both times your father overrode me. The irony of that cannot be lost on you. Why is your father dead, mistress? Whose negligence murdered him? Now the Adamantine Key has passed into the hands of a man devoted to restoring civility and propriety to our government, not the unsteady whims of a blind man. No. Let your brother be robbed of name and fame and all. Let his corpse sit in the view of the northern windows for an eternity, a warning to the generations yet to be. I will not be overruled this time.”

There was more argument, of course.

The Monstruwacan did not know he was arguing in favor of my venturing Out.

62.

I walk the halls of the Great Redoubt without an escort.

Whispers follow me, just loud enough for me to hear: There goes Antigone, a child of Naäni. Wasn’t the Lesser Redoubt destroyed, lo, these many ages ago, because the race of Naäni opened their gates and allowed the monsters within? Hasn’t her brother done the same?

One last time I go to the place where I spent so many weary hours in watch.

There she goes to stare at him again …

I am known to be in disfavor with Creon, the new Castellan. When I seek the great windows, and need someone to carry my stool, even my ladies and body servants hide, or report giggling to the infirmary with strange diseases and discomforts that do not otherwise appear. I have seen such things befall others in court: like a Night-Hound scenting blood, courtiers and serviles know I will not be in power long enough to avenge any petty insult done me, and so they slack their work.

Surely there is a taint in the blood, a restlessness, a madness. The founders of the Lesser Redoubt were restless, mad, ungovernable.

I can order them whipped, and the lector politely takes down the order, but somehow the names are lost from the correction list, and the burly thugs of the goal yard mumble and grin and speak of delays, and no one is ever punished for disobeying me.

A taint. How else could they force themselves to rulership above us, except that they scorn the rules we follow…?

The weight of the stool is not great, not at first, but the shape is awkward. The burghers and matrons on the Great Lifts eye my courtly dress and my ungainly load, as we sink the miles on wefts of magnetic force to the middle decks. All the while younger maids half my rank hide their smiles behind their fans, for even the humblest of them has a strapping footman to carry her parcels. They know what it means when a high-born bears her own burdens.

They have ruled us for generations, the House of Andros, and brought our ways of life to corruption. The Gate Crew let the horrors in, and betrayed a million years of oath. The Watch did not stop the brother when he slew his father. The men of the past were not so craven.

My uncle had engaged and supervised most of the personal staff appointments during my father’s life: they were his, not mine. I am sure he never said a word. Merely by a frown, by a tilt of his head, he could instruct the staff to keep me isolated.

Our age is corrupt. The Pneumatic House says the negative energy build up will soon reach the critical reaction threshold, and smite us all.

Parties, balls, receptions, I can have none, if my servants will not prepare them: and there are men to whom I could very well turn for my protection, whom the memory of honor, if nothing else, would require them to hear my pleas in full: but they are elite in rank and dignity, and to invite them to a barren meal of mash or gruel would be to offer an insult.

I heard from a bootblack that knows her handmaiden that he forced her, his own sister to couple with the he-monster.

And so I carry a stool on my shoulder. Eventually, I reach a wide corridor, dim and empty of all. Here is the spyglass: I place the stool before the eyepiece and climb up.

Even among girls, I am short, and so I must step on the stool to reach the dials that control the focus and elevation, or to reach the skull-cusps that protect and focus the thought-energy that follows the visual beam of the glass.

But this time, I am not here to examine the monsters, or to keep watch on my brother.

I turn the spyglass down, and study the slopes and windows and miles of buttresses forming the skirt and base of our great pyramid, that place I once was proud to call my home.

Carefully, I note the details, and I measure the distances between various points, selecting the safest route to descend.

63.

All persons, men and women both, are trained in the use of the Diskos. It is a weapon that never in our history, not for ten millions of years, has been used by one human being against another. In all the ages our histories record, no woman has ever ventured into the Night Lands, save only Mirdath the Beautiful. So why must we drill with the weapon as well?

To handle the weapon, when it is charged, improves the strength not just of the arm, but of the spirit, for not all the energies that live within the haft and blade are native to this our three-dimensional universe. A woman who can swing the heavy weapon through its paces and its strokes learns of her own inner strength, and can hear the Master Word that hides in her soul.

When the Power and Forces of the Land bend their malice upon the Last Redoubt, and all our dreams are troubled, or when the hopes and human feeling of the Millions reach across the darkened air to some stranded adventurer who crouches in the freezing Night Lands, waiting for unseen Death to strike, then are all the souls of all the living knitted together, and the aether rings as loudly with our paeans as a Home Call rings in the ear.

Beware, beware! Return, Lost Traveler, follow my Call, and return!

No woman who had not drilled with her weapon, and known its bright fire, its courage, tingling in the weapon haft, will have the valor, the strong spirit, needed to add her voice or her spirit to the Millions in time of need.

The weapons are kept in charging lockers in every twentieth house along each corridor; though, among the strange folk who live near the windows of the lower mile of the Pyramid, are some who follow the older tradition, and keep them in a charging rack that hangs before their windows, so that the monsters in the darkness outside can see the shivering light of the blade as it turns, and hear its low and potent growl.

It should have been simple to go to the arsenal, practice with the blade (as ancient law says all must do, both low and high, once a fortnight, save only the elderly, the infirm, and matrons bearing child) and then take it lightly away with me, so that I would be armed when I ventured forth.

Haemon was waiting for me in the practice chamber. He barred the exit when I tried to leave.

64.

“Step from my path, Haemon,” I said, craning my neck to look up at him.

He spread his arms and clutched the door posts of the practice chamber, one in either hand. I cannot tell you how foolish he looked when he tried to scowl sternly. His face was made for gaiety, his features for sculptors to worship. His eyes were as vacant and troubled as a child’s.

But he said, “Return your blade to the charging rack. You have no need to walk the corridors with it.” He said this in a pleading tone.

“You know where I am bound.”

He shook his handsome head. “Never. I would kill you before I would let you come alive into the Night Lands. If the monsters in the Breeding Pits take you, they will produce a new strain of abhuman, one who knows the Master Word, and all our gates will open for them. If the Wandering Dry Tree takes you, or the Doors That Open From Nowhere to Nowhere engulf you, then your soul will be Destroyed, and we will never meet in another life, not ever, for there will be nothing left of you.”

“Kill me then,” I said, “For I cannot live without my brother.”

He shook his head stubbornly, his lower lip pushed out.

“Then stand aside, or I’ll chop off your arm!” I said, flourishing my blade and raising it high. The wheel turned, and the terrible, low hum came forth like the growl of a beast.

He spoke the Master Word, and the spirit in the blade recognized a human soul, and the weapon trembled in my hand, unable to strike.

Foolishly, I tried to push past him, but he is not short and slight, as I am.

More foolishly, he tried to wrest the weapon from my hand, and he put his un-gauntleted hand on the haft, even though the weapon was live. A Diskos is only ever attuned to one wielder, and it is bad luck for one who is not its owner to touch the weapon, even by the hilts. There was a flash of light that left a purple dazzle in my eyes. Haemon pulled the weapon from my hands, but when I blinked the dazzle clear, he was lying on his back, groaning, and my weapon lay beside him, hissing.

Were I the heroine I thought I was, I would have picked up the Diskos and walked away and left him. But he groaned so miserably, that I knelt down beside him, and wiped his brow with the headcloth I had used to tie back my hair during practice.

He whispered.

“What?” I said.

His voice was weak. “Come dance with me.”

I could do nothing but blink.

He said, “Today one of my cousins is elevated. There will be a feast, served by singers, who will chant as they ladle the dishes. A woman from Eastpoint Darkhold will walk along a wire strung between the chandeliers, nimble beyond description, and wrestlers will throw and tumble. In the later hours, there will be a ball, and the musicians will play sweet airs from the days of light, when man lived in gardens that filled the world, and the sky was bright with lanterns, and they were devoted to nothing but song, and pleasure, and love-play. Those times will come again, and live in our hearts, if you come with me now, to my fete: it will be like the Daylight come again. Come, and dance in my arms.”

His voice is pleasant, like music, and staring down at him, I remembered what it had been like, when I was the daughter of the greatest man in the Last Redoubt, sister to the bravest, and betrothed to the comeliest.

He must have felt my thought in his heart, for he said, “Do you recall how the three of us played together when we were young? Your brother was no taller than you were, then, and so ashamed that his growth was coming so late. He would wake and come here to practice until the four bells of the first dog watch rang, then he and you and I would find some celebration, for there were always fat-pursed courtiers willing to entertain us, and make the tables groan with food, the ceilings ring with song, and we would weary our feet with dancing long past curfew. How have we let those times slip away from us?”

“Because we wished for greatness,” I muttered to myself. “Because he was not willing to stay within, here in the light, where it is safe. Because he was tormented by dreams the dull and ordinary men don’t know.”

“Forget your sorrow, Antigone. Come dance with me, and drink red wine, and kiss me. We will find a cabin near the core shaft of the Pyramid, half a mile from any window, and never hear the night noises call to us again. Is such a life so wrong?”

My weapon, no doubt because our voices were so soft, now stopped the turning of its blade, and the angry buzzing died into silence.

I said, “I remember. He used to practice here when Father wanted him to study the ancient thought-records, or work the mathematical tables of the architects. He insisted, even though he was below the age when weapon training normally begins. Yes, Haemon. I remember the days when I was in favor, and people tried to please me. There was a smith who made a child’s suit of armor for Polynices.”

He squinted. He was about to tell me that Creon had interdicted that name. No one was to speak it. But he caught himself, and he did not say it.

Even now, even now, I wonder what would have happened had he not flicked his eyes that way, had I not seen him flinch at my brother’s name. I might have changed my mind. I might have stayed with Haemon, and lived a life of pleasures sweet and meaningless.

Oh, I went with him to his feast, and I laughed and clapped when the funambulist walked on a wire, and I wagered Haemon in kisses when the wrestlers threw rice and stepped into the circle.

Of course I went with him. You see, the Proctors had noticed the disturbance in the aether when my weapon discharged, and they were approaching the practice chamber, and if they even suspected what I meant to do, it would mean the White Chamber for me, and perhaps mental retardation under a high-voltage glass.

So, to leave the Practice Chamber, it was easiest to agree to go with him, and cling to his arm, and smile, and have the Proctors step aside for the son of the new Castellan as once they stepped aside for me.

So, for one last night, I tasted the old life I was so soon to lose.

Poor Haemon. He was blushing with wine, and unsteady on the dance platform, when I asked him why he had not moved his hand when I threatened him with my Diskos?

He said with the perfect sincerity only wine brings out, when the bibbler forgets where he is: “Kill myself when I lose her. Antigone. Gone. If I can’t love her enough to keep her inside, I can’t love her enough to find her beyond death and life and rebirth. All lovers will be reunited, they say. What if she doesn’t love you so much? She just likes you? What then? Heh. If she kills me before she leaves, saves me the damn bother.”

And then he fell asleep at the table, while all around him carousers cheered and called the wassail.

65.

I found my brother’s old armor in his old room, sitting in a chest. The lock was one of those types operated by thought, but I knew my brother well, and loved him well, and could impersonate his spirit in my mind and memory, and so the lock opened for me.

There was a practice weapon within the chest as well, which had forks, but no wheel. But the haft was a real haft, even though made for someone my height, and could hold a charge of Earth-Current. The forks were not sharp, but the Diskos is made of a metal that does not rust, and there was an oil cloth and a magnetic file in the weapon kit.

There are public charging racks in every twentieth house down every corridor.

And I still knew the word to open the long-deserted balcony lock down in the lower levels of the Last Redoubt, the one which I had discovered as a child.

I did not have a capsule implanted under my forearm, nor was I subjected to the energies and training regime of the Preparation. There was no help for that. But I did find the pomander where Haemon had hidden a deadly drug he no doubt bought or stole from a mountebank, which could be crushed to emit a lethal scent. I pinned it to the inside cheek plate of my helmet, where I could bite it with my teeth, if need be.

66.

There were no lines of solemn Watch saluting with their darkened weapons as I left. I was alone, creeping from step to windy step, crawling like an ant down the armored side of the Pyramid of Man, following a line of where the armor had buckled, perhaps under the thought-pressure of some assault half a million years ago.

They say that the world is older than the Last Redoubt, but I doubt it. The theory, long disregarded, that the Last Redoubt hung in the void alone, and was the center of an accretion of space-born dust and gasses, which over long ages gathered around it, is one I now have new faith in. I saw the great ribs of the building where the armored plate was cracked, and stepped on places where no human foot has ever stepped, not since the First Workmen raised these slabs by magic from whatever world of light, the world my brother saw in dreams, is said to have existed before history began.

Once I stopped and sat on a buttress and ate from the tablets I had smuggled out of a locker. I was not Prepared, and I had recently been to a feast, so the distilled essence of nutriment gave me stomach cramps instead of spiritual surcease.

I tried to scratch my name into the slab I sat on with the forks of my weapon, but the metal is imperishable. Even the architects do not know what it is made of, although mimetic analysis shows it is sterner than matter, made of a dense, sluggish fluid rather than a balance of positive and negative energies embracing mostly empty space, as atoms are.

I stepped on to the gritty sand at the foot of a flying buttress.

I was in the Night Land. And, oh my, it was cold. So cold.

67.

A short walk further, and I stepped over the low white line we call the Electric Circle. Up close, it is a hollow tube of transparent metal, held in little brackets nine inches off the ground. There is a living light within, whose properties the architects do not reveal to those outside their order. The weapon in my hand tugged and tingled when I stepped over it; sympathetic resonance. I was also dazed and sickened for a moment. Once again, I was unprepared, and did not know the mind-cues necessary to allow such potent aether-forces to play across my body without harm.

Once I was beyond the Circle, I felt it. The slow, crawling, nightmarish sensation of despair, self-loathing, utter inhumanity the ancient texts mention. It was the Presence of the Night Land, and I was not ready to resist it. I was perhaps two steps across the Electric Circle, and my weapon fell from my numb fingers, and I was on my hands and knees, my helm thrown back, vomiting a steaming mass of last night’s feast onto the frost-streaked slate.

I crawled perhaps twenty yards away. Here was a tall rock. The side facing away from the Last Redoubt was in deep shadow, and there was a depression there, a sandy pit. I thrust myself into the pit, and lay there, waiting for death.

The balconies of light above me, the huge structure of the Last Redoubt, filled half of heaven. The sheer size of the edifice cannot be described: despite that it slopes away sharply, its seven miles and more of height makes it seem ready to topple on an observer standing below. The lower half-mile is entirely plated over and dark, so the details of the surface I had just descended where invisible. Starting about half a mile up, too far away to make out individual embrasures, or even the masses of embrasures indicating the presences of stacked cities, it seems a wall of light, merely with ripples of texture running through it, strata of slightly different hues as different races and peoples in the different cities burn slightly different combinations of light-fuel, or use a different type of luminifer. The towers and castles that crown the highest levels, which seemed so large when I lived among them, from here could not even be glimpsed. Only the Great Tower of the Monstruwacans, which rises sheer from the crown of the Last Redoubt an extra mile into the cloud, can be seen.

Perhaps an hour I lay sickened, staring at the Home of Man. I could smell green growing things, the scent from greenhouses a mile above me, and I tried to calculate which cities had such extensive gardens facing this side of the Pyramid. Gazing back at my home gave me strength.

I walked and picked up my helmet and weapon-rod, and urged my cloak to its warmest, and I began walking away. I knew that the encampment of the giants was on the other side of the Last Redoubt, near the great gate. The giants were further from me than the Pit of Red Smoke.

The weapon was a weariness to carry, and I did not wish to lean upon it, lest the metal butt make a noise striking a rock. However, the haft can be shorted, and the forks folded, so that I could sling it from a strap over my back; but in such a position it is not ready at hand. If I tucked it through my belt, it chafed my hip and smote against my knee; if I held it across my shoulder, my arm grew weary.

I realized that I did not know how to carry my weapon.

I soon found out I also did not know how to walk. I did not know what was safe to step on and what was not. Some of the substance was sand which gave way, some was rock, which did not, but other was mud-pit, thinly coated with dark ice, which tried to swallow my leg. Walking in sand was so different and so difficult compared to walking down corridors or even across greenhouse lawns, my legs soon ached from the unfamiliar motions.

The first time I tried to cross a stretch of bare rock, my footsteps clattered so loudly in my ears, that I froze in fear.

In the middle distance, I heard a soft hoot of noise. It was answered by a louder sound, a cough, coming from the blackness to the other side of me. I crouched down and covered myself with my cloak, trusting in its camouflage to save me.

I was not yet half a mile from the Pyramid.

68.

Nothing came at me from out of the Night, so, after a time, I moved again.

I began to try to skulk from rock to rock, from moss bush to moss bush, as I had so often seen Polynices do when I watched his image in the glass from the safety of the Viewing Chamber.

Snow was as difficult to tread as sand, but slipperier and colder, and my boots were made for my brother’s feet, not mine, and the seals were not water-tight, so my feet soon chafed with cold, and my stockings were filled with moisture.

Then I came across some liquid substance (I do not know what it is called) which hovered just under patches of black snow, and clings to armor, and works its way in through the joints. Once inside the boot, it stings and scalds the flesh. Twice I stopped and doffed by leg armor, and tried to scrape the gluey substance from me. My gauntlets could find no purchase on it; when I tried to scrape it with my nails, it made my fingers itch and go numb. Eventually, I poured part of my supply of drinking powder on it. The powder fizzes and becomes water on contract with air, and the chemical energy of the reaction was enough to wash this acid glue from me.

The problem was, that the place where I crawled was streaked with long, straight, shallow scars in the ground, which ran parallel to my direction of travel. If I stayed within these scars (they were too shallow to be called valleys) I could not be seen from the left or from the right. But this acidic oil, whatever it was, had gathered in puddles or little pools at the bottom of the scars, beneath little deceptive crusts of snow, so the safest place to crawl was also the most uncomfortable. I also did not know if the substance was dangerous, or merely irksome. There was no way to tell what it was. I could not look at it. My only way to make a light was to force a discharge from my weapon-rod, and I was not about to do that.

So I crawled through it.

After an hour or so, the feeling began to come upon me that these scars or crater-rows were not straight, but were slowly curving to the South, away from the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk, and toward the Dark Palace. There was nothing to look at overhead to give me direction, but when I stood and looked back toward the Last Redoubt, I was still so close to it, and it was still so large, that it occupied the whole horizon behind me, and so I could not tell if I were moving directly away from it, or diagonally. I stooped to crawl again through the muck, and my knees, and my legs, and my hands were numb and swollen, and the fumes made me weep.

Eventually, after many hours of this torment of wading and crawling through this acidic oil, I saw ahead of me an outcropping of rock, shaped something like a saddle, where the ground rose up before falling away into a valley or low place beyond. Better yet, I saw a drift of steam from the rocky slope to one side, where a boiling spring of water, gray with chemical contamination, bubbled forth. I could see the streamlet clearly, for the light from the Pyramid behind me fell across the slope rising ahead of me.

Much relieved, I climbed the slope, doffed my helm, and washed my hands and feet. I was careful to put my armor back on. I walked to the high part of the slope, so that I could look down into the valley beyond. I needed to orient myself, and pick out a path to the country where Polynices lay, which is near the dread House of Silence.

The mighty pyramid was shining behind me, and now I was far enough off from it, that, craning back my neck, I could see its overall triangular shape.

I turned my back, and stared into the darkness ahead. It was unwise to have looked back at the Last Redoubt, for the light had dazzled me, and it took a moment for my eyes to adapt.

I blinked and blinked again. There were three shapes, larger than sphinxes, dark against the horizon ahead of me. Their eyes glimmered like lanterns in the gloom, and I could feel the malice and pitiless hate which poured forth from the creatures. Because of the darkness of the valley between us, I could not guess their size or location. Perhaps they were gigantic and far-off; perhaps they were smaller and closer.

Next I saw that they were in shadow. The light from the Pyramid behind me was not striking them. The slope they occupied was shorter than the one where I stood. Even a Monstruwacan at the top of the tallest part of his tower, would not have seen these creatures, because the hill where I stood blocked the view. In the millions of years since the siege of the Last Redoubt began, I was perhaps the first fully human person to view them.

Then I saw that it was not a horizon behind them; there was a film, a cloud of gas or low-hanging mist, lit with some feeble chemical illumination, occupying the fields behind the shapes. Because the gas was lighter than the creatures, I could see their silhouette against it.

Even as I watched, the mist trickled forward a small way, rippling up over the shoulders and crowns of the motionless creatures, and blurring them. Soon they were lost from my sight, and all I saw were tendrils of vapor, perhaps smaller than rivers, trickling slowly across the valley floor toward my position. The vapor illumined the valley, which I now saw was filled with the bones of giants.

As suddenly and sharply as a blow of a club across my head, I felt a disturbance in the aether. It was the roar of a thousand human voices, ten thousand, a million, calling out silently their shock and fear and alarm. It washed across the Night Lands like a wave of an unseen sea.

I flinched and raised my weapon, and turned.

The Last Redoubt was ablaze with lights; the aether was shaking.

They had seen me. One hundred thousand spyglasses were turned toward me. Thousands more of the folk, uncounted myriads more, were running to the Viewing Tables.

In the trembling in the aether, I sensed both love and alarm. I remember Polynices telling me about a dream he once had of the elder days, when great ships crossed bodies of water larger than lakes, but the water was salt, and too wide to swim from side to side. If a child in a day like that had fallen from a ship like that, all the passengers leaning from the rails, seeing the child floundering in the salt waves, would have cried aloud even as the ten millions of the Last Redoubt cried out in spirit for me.

Great was that cry, because I was a woman, the first to break the ancient rule; because I was unprepared; because I was standing in the open, in a brightly lit place, with the pyramid behind me, and watching eyes in the gloom before me.

Because I was foolish and certain to perish.

One of the tendrils of mist began to rear up from the valley floor and arch through the sky above me, the way one might see a centipede rear up its tiny front parts to fall down upon and consume an insect even smaller.

I turned and fled, seeking lower ground, darkness where to hide.

69.

Hours later, flashing lanterns in their thousands winked on and off along the high escarpment of the Last Redoubt, sending flairs of light beating across the Night Land. It was in the coded language called the Set Speech, warning me that the abomination known as the Great Gray Widow was upon my trail.

I walked through a valley pockmarked with vents and fire-holes; there must have been a belt of poisonous air there, hanging low to the ground, for I grew dazed and sick. Men who venture out carry small and well-made tools to detect and neutralize such gasses. I had no such thing with me. Choking, I turned my steps back, seeking higher ground, but, there above me, where the lights from the Last Redoubt splashed across a jagged course of rocks and stones, I saw first the fingers, then the pale hand and elongated arm of the Widow, reaching up over the pass. The fingers crawled down in among the rocks, feeling blindly for me.

I descended into the poisonous air. It burned in my lungs, but only at first; I soon grew numb to it. I faded into and out of a strange dreaming, where distances and time were distorted.

Behind, I saw the great lumpy shoulder of the Widow crest the valley pass. Not long after, her deathly white face, its mouth parts working and slavering nastily, rose like the moon of the ancient world, and her lank hairs hung from her skull, trailing in a great curtain behind her.

I found a monolith, carved with unknown glyphs. Perhaps it was made by man in ancient and forgotten times: no Monstruwacan has ever speculated that the Outer Things have writings. The glyphs where jagged curls, like entrails, as if the unknown language had no other words but exclamations of fear and pain. These ugly letters were set deep enough that my hands and feet found purchase.

At fifty feet above the valley floor, my head cleared: the air was cold and smelled of burning metal, but the fume no longer choked me. At seventy-five feet, I was still not out of the reach of the Great Gray Widow, but I was on the side of the monument facing away from the Last Redoubt, deep in shadow, so I drew my cloak about me and held still, hoping not to be seen.

The Widow trailed her long segmented body down the slopes, and rested her great chin on a stone not far from the base of the monument. Her wormlike arms ranged here and there across the great rocks and dells of this valley, prodding and poking into smoke-holes, seeking me. I noticed how oddly delicate her motions were. Once she sent one of her hands reaching up the side of the monolith, the fingers lightly tapping and touching here and there, trying to find me by feel. The hand passed close to me, so that I could see the bristles growing from the thick hide of her hand, and I could smell the foetid matter encrusting her long nails.

But eventually the poison gas overcame her, and her head drooped down, and her leathery lids fell across her burning eyes.

At that same moment, I felt a thrill underneath my hands. It was not as if the monument grew warmer, or stirred, or as if sound came from it. I can hardly explain what it was. But the knowledge came upon me that the monument was alive, charged with a monstrous awareness. As if all the crooked circular runes up and down the monolith-shaped shell had somehow become eyes, staring with inhuman awareness in all directions; staring in all directions, but concentrating its terrible will in one direction.

The huge body of the Widow trembled slightly, and her skin seemed to press inward against her skull and bones. This valley was the trap of this monument, and the poison gas its venom, and now it was drawing some sort of spiritual or aetherial nutriment, or perhaps pleasure only, from the vast bulk of dying flesh below it.

Quickly I climbed down from the monument. It was surely aware of me; I could feel a disturbance in the aether each time I stepped from one curving glyph to the next. Yet nothing acted to harm me.

Except, of course, that I lowered myself back into the belt of poisonous air. As quickly as I could, I sought to climb the valley slopes and come out of the noxious gas. I could feel the watchful, patient thought-pressure from the obelisk behind me.

In a foggy delirium, I walked, dead-footed, and knowing that to pause or rest or stumble would be to die.

Eventually, darkness folded over my eyes. My memory is dim, nightmares of numb walking, of placing one aching foot after the other.

70.

I woke lying facedown on a plain of rock and gravel, and the air was bitter cold, but not poisonous. I folded away the forks of my weapon-rod, extended the haft, and placed it under my armpit, for I was too weary to stand otherwise. Slowly I rose to my feet, using my weapon as a crutch.

How was I alive? Could my body have continued its walking motions even after I had fainted?

It was deathly quiet in all directions in the Night Land. No voice called to one another from mountain to mountain. The machinery that throbs and murmurs in the buried houses of the Devolved Ones could not be heard. The volcanoes were quiet. The Country of the Great Laughter was still.

To one side of me, and far away, I saw the silhouette of the Crowned Watcher against the glare of the distant Plain of Blue Fire. But its mask was turned toward the Great Redoubt, and not toward me. I was seeing the right flank of the entity, where it loomed, larger than a hill, above the broken and gloomy landscape. There was a second, smaller hill huddled up against it. I could not see it clearly, for it was merely a rounded bulk in the darkness, huge and many miles away. And yet the impression left with me was that I was seeing a child suckling at its mother. Something in the posture, position, or proportion of this second figure, the way it crouched beneath the flank of the Crowned Watcher, lent this impression. Of all the things I saw in the Night Land, it is this that the Monstruwacans question me most closely about, and yet of this I saw no details, and it may have been my imagination only, the way the tired eye will look at some hideous face of an ogre intent on the death of all mankind, and see nothing but a tumble of rocks.

I turned.

Behind me, not fifty yard from my position, loomed a Silent One. At first I did not see it, for the shrouds covering this great and terrible spirit-creature were of the same hue as the mists and fogs behind it. Its hood was pointed away from me, bent toward the Road which curved in a great arch, running from the south to the north.

I fell to my knees, and then to my face, expecting death. I took the poisoned pomander in my teeth, ready to slay myself should the Silent One draw near; although its powers were known to reach over distances, and it need not draw near.

Next I felt a pressure in my soul, and I somehow knew that this great being would not harm me, if I did not further disturb it. Slowly I crawled away from it, making as little noise as possible. The hooded figure never moved.

The area behind the Crowned Watcher was a land we called The Place Where the Silent Ones are Never. Toward that place I made now with all speed, for reasons that should be obvious.

This land is mostly flat, with some canyons. The plain is cracked in places with a river of boiling mud, and strange lights shine from some of the canyons, though no man knows what is in their deeper parts, being hidden from the gaze of the Last Redoubt. Steam rises from cracks and craters here, and there is an abundance of moss-bush, as well as volcanic heat. It is, indeed, more friendly to life than other places where nests of abhumans and giants have been found, so it is a matter of speculation why so few are glimpsed here.

71.

I crawled to a nearby smoke-hole, and approached the warm hole carefully, so that I saw the giant seated there, with the broken shards of truncheons all about him. He was motionless, though I sensed his awareness, and so I could not tell if he were alive, merely caught in a distortion of time, or dead, and lingering as a ghost or aether echo.

The next smoke-hole I crawled to was unoccupied, save for a nest of scorpions I burnt with the forks of my weapon. I lay on the warm sand, half-awake, for many hours, while my strength returned.

72.

Eventually I pressed northward again. I have not recorded here, as is customary, an account of how many hours I walked, when I ate, or how many I slept. This is because, among the other equipment traditional to travelers, but not found in my brother’s locked chest, was a dial. I had no way of measuring the passing hours, so, at times, my head would nod, and slumber would come upon me, and I thought it was an Influence of the Spirit seeking to slay me.

I would eat when I thought to do it. At first I ate when I was hungry, and found my supplies dangerously low, since hunger pangs continued whether I ate or not. The Tablets do not fill the belly, but enter the bloodstream directly, and sustain the cells by means of subtle life-essences. Eventually I lost my ability to feel hunger, which is the first step of Preparation. At some point after this, the constant aching desire to shout aloud and run toward the tall shapes of the Watching Things receded in my mind, and I was able to walk toward the destinations I selected, rather than having my footsteps unaccountably pulled toward this Watching Thing or that one. The clear-headedness which comes from fasting had the disadvantage that now, without a dial, I could not tell when I must eat, for I felt no hunger at all.

I ate only when my limbs went weak.

73.

Six times I paused in the Place Where The Silent Ones are Never, and always I found some firepit or smoke-hole to warm me as I slept. Once I woke, and found a small golden light shining from a point on the ground half a foot from me. Even as I stirred and rose, it winked out.

I stood and looked back at the Last Redoubt. I was now far enough from it that I could see the whole shape in one glance. The aether was troubled, but it was as if with a sigh; as if the millions in the Pyramid had seen some dreadful danger pass me by as I slept, and their souls where great with relief and joy for me.

I opened the forks of my weapon-rod and saluted the Pyramid, and the aether was disturbed as if with a great cheer.

What the danger was which came so nigh to me, or what that point of golden light had been that bathed me as I slept and saved me, I do not know.

74.

In another place, as I rested, I doffed my helm to wash my hair in the astringent chemical which I found, warm and bubbling, at the lowest point of the bowl of a crater. The crater seemed a safe place, for the walls to each side were rock, all of light hue save one square dark patch, and there was sand underfoot. I was hidden from view, and there was no approach to surprise me.

As I knelt wringing out my locks, I became aware that the slope of dark rock to my left was not rock at all, but a crevasse. In the darkness my eyes had deceived me. There was a large square doorway set in the sloping side of the crater where I hid, and the gap of the door was perhaps thirty feet wide and fifty feet tall.

A great troubling came upon me when I beheld it, for one the dreams I had suffered when in the valley of poisoned smoke was that I would descend into such a door as this, and it troubled me greatly to recognize certain outcrops and shapes in the rock from my dream.

At that moment, as I stared in horror at that great gap, the mighty voice of the Home Call sounded across the Night Land. It is not sounded save when danger is so near and so terrible that to give the monsters, half-humans and unseen Forces of the Night knowledge that a child of man crept forth was held to be of no account.

The black mist which hung above me parted, and I saw, coming from the north, the Slowly Turning Wheel. Only the rim projected from the dark clouds around it, and the reddish light of the northern volcanoes splashed against it, making it visible to me. The hub of that huge wheel was still hidden in the cloud, and so I did not die when I looked up.

I looked down and noticed that I was standing very near the opening of the dark gap. My helmet was many yards from me, and the poisonous pomander which held my death in it was out of my grasp. I doubted I could sprint across the sandy floor of the crater, and reach the helmet, before the Slowly Turning Wheel descended the slope of the crater. To slay myself with my weapon-rod would be difficult, since the spirits that dwell in such weapons are protective of the lives to which they are attuned.

Instead I ran, even as my dream foretold, into the doorway in the rock wall. Here was a great highway, sloping downward into the Earth. It was utterly black, and I was sorely afraid, but the Slowly Turning Wheel was coming into view above the rim of the crater, and it is one of the Greater Powers which no human spirit can withstand.

Perhaps it was many hours, perhaps a week while I descended that highway. I did not notice when the way became tangled before me with other openings, some of the paths straight, some curving. By the time I turned, it was too late: I came to a fork, and did not know which was my road.

Much time passed while I crawled blind through the underground city; and I was filled with dread when I scented a sickening odor, or felt my gauntlets or greaves become entangled with some sticky slime trails which were traced across the floors and walls and ceilings there.

More than once, I felt the air move past my face, as some great bulk in the dark moved past with wondrous silence. Sometimes, straining my ears, I would perhaps catch a hint of many tiny soft, sticky noises, as if a monstrous slug-thing, larger than a mansion, were sliding past me in the gloom.

My fingers touched both the corpses of many abhumans and larger creatures rotting there, as well as what I guessed were tools, and the wreckages of the machines once used to give warmth and air to these dwellings. There were metal circles which were perhaps the rims of vents or sewer lines here and there, and often I felt knobs or chains or toothed cogwheels scattered across the floors, some of them flat, others buckled with age.

How deep and wide that dead and buried city is, I cannot guess; but I wonder if the Silent Ones avoid this country out of respect or terror for the great and stinking creatures that moved so quietly past me in the utter darkness.

I passed back and forth across certain roads and buried chambers so often that I have memorized them, even now, and know the shapes of the rock and metal beneath my fingers, though I have never seen them.

I slowly ran short of rations.

I resisted the temptation to light my weapon and look around me, for whenever the temptation came upon me, I knew not whether there was a great creature clinging to the wall or ceiling nearby, whose transparent skin might react to the light, and sense me there.

To resist that temptation, which weighed upon me every minute of the uncounted hours I was there, I often thought of my brother, and how brave he was; I told myself that he would live again, and I would save him. These thoughts sustained me.

Only once did a voice speak out of the darkness. “ . . . through tears . . . noise of eternity in my ears, we parted . . . She whom I love.”

What these words mean, I know not, nor who or what spoke them in the darkness. I was convinced that it was not a living human who spoke, not something from this continuum of time and space, and so I did not even utter the Master Word in challenge. I clutched my knees and made no noise at all. Perhaps I dreamed.

Eventually I found the entrance again. You will understand if I say I felt no joy in finding it, since I thought I was seeing another dream. I had suffered many dreams in the buried city of finding the exit and walking out again. I walked like a sleepwalker, with stiff and awkward steps up the sunken highway to the gap in the rock: here was the crater I had left. There was my helmet, undisturbed.

The horrible Night Lands, a dark country lit only by fitful light from broken places in the earth, and subterranean fires, seemed bright to me, and the fair shining of the Last Redoubt, was paradise itself, the sunlight of the elder world.

Of all the peoples in the Last Redoubt, I am the only one who has ever seen it truly. It is fair beyond words.

75.

You are wondering why I do not mention a great roar of aether-noise when the millions saw me climb up from the buried city to the air again. It is because none came.

Several times over the next few hours, I would pause and look back at the shining peak of the Last Redoubt. More than once, I am sure, I must have been visible to the Monstruwacans, had anyone turned a spy glass in my direction.

No doubt they thought I had died beneath the shadow of the Slowly Turning Wheel. It had been weeks since I was seen, more than a month. They thought me dead.

76.

You are wondering how I knew that it was a month I spent in that underground place, where I had no dial, no means of counting the time. I knew it was exactly a month.

How did I know? You are too young to ask that question, child. When you are old enough to wed, your wife will explain it.

77.

Beyond the Place stretches the gray ribbon of the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk. On the far side of that Road, nearer than the point where the Hot Stream passes under it, was the spot where my brother lay.

Many times I had measured the distance in the spyglass between his motionless body and the small hill on which the House of Silence rests, and many times confirmed that the terrible and silent structure was far enough away that a rescue was feasible. Now, seeing it with my eyes, the somber House with its small, unwinking, unwavering lights in its gaping windows from which no sound has ever come forth, not in uncounted millions of years, now, I saw that it was far too close to my brother. I was many miles away from the House, and yet there seemed to be some strange clarity in the atmosphere between it, and me, so that the details of the place were sharp and visible to the eye.

The House proper has smaller outbuildings to the left and right, brooding structures as still and silent as itself. There are monoliths and standing stones rising solemnly from the barren ground before its dark windows. Not far from the ever-open doors are two metal posts upright in the black ground, and atop these posts are two lanterns caging each one a pale point of light that illuminates nothing, a light that neither moves nor flutters, but is still.

I was afraid to cross the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk, for it is wide, elevated a small ways from the soil, and the House of Silence commands an unobstructed view. Sleeping and waking twice more, I walked and crawled the many miles to the North, where the Hot Stream cuts beneath the Road. The bridge which spans the stream is made of the same substance as the road, whether metal or stone or some artificial substance, I did not approach the Road closely enough to see. I captured a large bubble of air in my cloak to give me buoyancy, and slid into the steaming, bitter waters, and drifted with the current beneath the bridge. There were organisms like long white worms clinging to the underside of the Road substance, and long strings or tendrils hung from their open mouths. These mouth-tendrils lit up with soft cool light as I passed beneath the worm-things, but the creatures did me no hurt. As far as I know, these beings exist in nowhere in all the world but that one spot, in the shadow of that strange bridge.

I was very near the House of Silence when I crawled from the bank, and hid beneath a moss-bush. All the ground near the Hot Stream was covered over with spore and moss, nodding mushrooms and puff-balls. It is very soft underfoot, but the spore bruises easily, and changes from dark to pale where it is bruised, so that footprints would last for many hours, and be seen from a distance. I moved very carefully to tread only on moss or hard stone, and in one place, I crawled on my belly for several hours, keeping a low line of moss-bush, a thin cover, between the windows of the House and me.

In one place the moss-bush was broken, and I saw up the slope, that the House was much nearer than I had thought, and I feared some Influence was trying to draw me against my will into those Doors Never Closed.

I saw the House from an angle no living person had ever seen, for the back parts and the yard behind the House were clear to me. Here I saw a nine-sided structure, roughly half as tall as the House, with open doors built along similar lines as the doors of the house, one in each face of the building. Looking into those open doors, I saw a strange nothingness, an ever-opening abyss, for the nine-sided structure, by some bent geometry of torn space, was larger within than without: and I could not shake the notion that something in that abyss, as if peering out in all directions from those doors, saw and rejoiced in the silence created by the House and spread out from it. I understood next the meaning of their other smaller buildings and tall stones standing quietly so nigh upon the House.

There must be something about the House of Silence which makes it even more terrible than the other horrors of the Night Land, more terrible than we suspect, for even the nameless powers of the Land do homage to it.

The sense of numbness, the perfect stillness of the aether, which radiated from the House as if from an iceberg troubled my spirit: I moved away from the House less carefully, willing only to put distance between myself and it.

78.

It was not long after I ate my final tablet of nutriment, that I lost the position of my brother.

The smoke-hole where he lay had either smothered itself over, or the buried fires feeding it had gone out, during the month while I was underground. I traveled in circles, very cautiously and very slowly, casting about, and I could not find it.

My limbs grew weak as I stumbled from cover to cover, hiding behind tall rocks and low moss-bushes. He was not here. No landmark of the landscape I had studied so lovingly for so long through my spyglass could be found, now that I walked among them.

Eventually I found a shallow pit where I fell down and could not rise again. Despair was all I knew. Even had I been tall and strong, how could I hope to drag my brother’s body all the way back to the Last Redoubt? As it was, I was weakened by many weeks of hard journey, spiritual and mental damage from the Forces I had brushed near, weakness from breathing bad air and being exposed to deadly cold.

Andros, my ancestor, had once made a journey longer than this. But he had been well prepared for it, as well as having strength like something out of legend, and the Gift of the Night-Hearing, which allowed him to sense the movements of the enemy before they saw him.

And yet, in the accounts I heard, my ancestress Mirdath had suffered a journey far harsher than his. She had escaped the fall of her Redoubt, and lived in the lesser Night Lands surrounding that place for over a month, without hope and without destination, until her True Love came across all the abyss of eternity, across all the horror of the Night Land, to find her again. She had no special talents, no legendary strength, and yet no account surviving of her great journey tells of doubt, or despair. Fear, yes; none can walk these lands without fear. But she did not fall on her face, unwilling and unable to rise again.

And, even as I thought these things, an awareness came upon me of how quiet the Night Land was. All through my journey, a strange quiet had gripped the Land.

I understood. I used a mental discipline to hide from myself the full import of what I understood, and my thoughts grew clear as the crystal waters purified by the Earth-Current.

Slowly, I drew my feet under me, and slowly I rose to my feet. I stood swaying, as brave as Mirdath the Beautiful.

I drew my weapon, unfolded the forks, and extended the haft to its full length. Holding it high overhead, I lit it, and a flare of light issued from the forks, and a low roar like the murmur of thunder, a fearsome noise to hear.

I called out my brother’s name. I was not afraid, at that moment, of whom or what might hear.

I called twice and three times, brandishing my shining weapon overhead like a torch.

The cry of the Night-Hound answered me.

79.

I doused the weapon and followed the sound of the howls. For another hour or more I clambered over rocks or walked, leaning on my weapon-rod, across flat uplands carpeted in moss.

There was Dracaina, still guarding her fallen master’s body. As I thought, the smoke-hole had expired. The monster hound stood nearby on her haunches, her grim head thrown back, yowling with sorrow.

I stepped over the edge of the little hollow, and trickles of black sand rose and fell around my feet as I walked and slid down to where she waited.

The monster rose to all fours. She was larger than I recalled: could it be possible she was still growing? Her coat had developed ugly bristles, and a horny growth across her chest and neck showed she was developing the armored skin of a fully-grown Night-Hound.

She lowered her head and growled, and the bristles of her neck stood out and quivered.

I spoke the word Polynices had told me: aeaeae! And then I said: “Sit!”

She did not sit, but moved forward toward me, and lowered her grisly head toward me. My weapon was live in my hand, and the forks were shining with that same energy which races through a spinning Diskos, but I did not raise it.

She carefully sniffed my armor and cloak.

No. Not mine. It was the armor and cloak of Polynices she scented.

Now she whined a friendly whine, and her lolling scorpion-tail lashed back and forth, and with her nose she nuzzled the scrip where I had been carrying my tablets. But there were none left to feed her.

This most hateful monster of my race, the most ancient enemy of man, I could not raise my weapon to smite her, even though all wisdom and reason said I must.

Instead I said, “Help me. Help me carry the body back.”

The blood-red eyes glared at me unwinkingly, and ropy drool fell from between her shark-teeth, but she seemed to understand, and she lashed her poisonous tail in a friendly fashion.

80.

I doffed my gauntlet and stooped and touched my brother’s Diskos where it lay with the back of my hand. There was no jolt, as I expected, but there was a tingle, enough to show me that the Master Monstruwacan had been wrong. Polynices was alive, but his life was somehow suspended.

I detached the heavy round blade from his Diskos, and gingerly placed the forks of my haft around it. I stood there, expecting to be knocked from my feet by a flare, but I filled my heart with love for my brother, and my memory with little anecdotes and images from our past together. Our souls were close enough together that his weapon did not react, except that it spun and lit up, and the low, terrible hum of the weapon came forth.

The blade was about forty pounds, almost twice the weight I used in practice. I had to take the heavy aetheric fluid out of the haft of his weapon and pump it into the butt of my own, in order to counterbalance the weight. His weapon I folded and telescoped, and slung across my back.

The monster retreated when my blade was lit, and now she was staring at me with a look I would have called thoughtful and calculating had I seen it on a human face.

“Dracaina! Here! Help me lift him!”

Tentatively she stepped forward. Awkwardly I tried once and twice and three times to get my shoulder under my brother, and pick him up off his feet, and haul him up to the back of the beast, whose shoulder was taller than my head. Had I been in good health, well-fed and well-rested, it still would have been impossible.

The monster looked at me sardonically, gripped his cloak in her teeth, and flipped her head backward. His body went flying, heels high into the air, and landed with a sickening thud across the spines and bristles of her back. I bit back a scream, wondering if I had heard bones crack or not.

I would have stuck my Diskos into the creature’s neck armor then and there, had I not needed her so desperately to haul my brother back to the Last Redoubt.

I took apart the straps of his war belt and cincture, and used these to tie him awkwardly to her back. The fact that sharp bristles snagged his cloak gave his body enough purchase to stay in place.

I found his poke, sealed and unopened. Within was a handful of the tablets of nutriment. I immediately swallowed two or three tablets.

Dracaina whined so plaintively that I had no heart to deny her: the hideous mouth reached down, and, instead of biting off my hand and arm, the grisly lips picked up the offered tablet from my palm with great delicacy. I cannot tell you how strange it was to have the hot breath of a Night Monster tickling my bare hand.

I reached out and took a tuft of her mane in my left fist, as I had seen Polynices do. Slowly, I began walking all the miles back across the Night Land. Docilely she followed me, bearing my burden for me, something no human would have done for me.

81.

Up until the moment when she saved my life, I was planning on killing her.

You may think it strange that someone my size, as weak as I was then, could make such a plan, but, if so, you have never swung a Diskos. Half the strength of the swing comes from the weapon itself, for there is a grim and stern spirit inside it; and the velocity of the spinning blade would make it bite and cut and pull itself into the wound, even if the blade were merely lightly touching the target. And the flare of Earth-Current is as deadly as a lighting bolt, and the aetheric vibrations fatal to spiritual and neural coherence of nonhumanity.

It is a dread weapon indeed, and I had no doubt that, once I was nigh the Electric Circle, and needed her aid no longer, I could smite her dead. She could not fend off the stroke with her jaws, after all.

Such were my thoughts as we walked, her huge bulk lumbering behind my slow steps.

Then she stopped and raised her head, sniffing the air. She was still as a picture, with only her muzzle whiskers twitching. Her scorpion tail began to swell with poison, like a bladder inflating. Her red eyes turned this way and that in her sockets.

She knelt, offering me her shoulder.

I stared in disbelief. It was like something from one of my brother’s dreams. Did she want me to climb onto her shoulders?

Then I heard a noise both terrifying and welcome. It was the Home-Call, trumpeting forth from the Last Redoubt. From across the miles, someone had spied me, knew me to be alive. I am not surprised. Since the time when I waved my flashing weapon overhead and screamed, I had taken no precautions to hide myself.

The Home-Call, that mighty voice which rang between the dark, smoke-smothered heavens and the dark, horror-haunted earth, came shouting across the hills and valleys, the smoldering pits and unsleeping monsters, rang out because a danger had also been spied, not far from me.

I climbed onto Dracaina’s back

82.

There was nothing in our life that was like this. If this is what my brother dreamed, when he saw the eldest days of the world, small wonder the dream had obsessed him.

Every child has surely tried to slide down the banister of some great public stairway. They fall perhaps as fast as this. Or perhaps the flying boys who sail on kites down the miles of the great air shafts, carrying messages, match a speed like this, but they merely glide through the air: a kite is not a huge beast, the heat from her monster heart rising through your grieves, between your legs, her blood-red eye picking out the path from the blurred ground beneath her thundering paws, while you cling to the bristles of her mane, astonished.

There are wonders in the Last Redoubt, great architectural triumphs, ancient libraries, meshes of bright-work and thought-work which took a half a million years to perfect; there are dances atop the great energy plates which focus the vital forces involved; there are men with strange talents who tell strange tales; there is the great crack in the Earth buried far beneath us, from which the living power surges which grants us life in the cold and deadly world. There is marriage, and childbirth, and pleasure from wine and song and aether-wave sculpture.

But nothing like this. The sheer animal joy of it was beyond compare. We were going faster than the fastest sprinter of a cross-corridor race, and yet covering more miles than a downstairs marathon.

83.

The dark world spun away underfoot as Dracaina pounded it with her claws. To the left and right, I began to see the pursuit.

You will think me mad, but I laughed with relief. My pursuit was not the Slowly Turning Wheel. It was not the Pale Tree, or the Oblong Cylinder, or the Strangely Quiet Eight-Forked Object. It was not even a Humped Thing, or one of the many Dwellers In the Angles of Time, or a Silent One, or one of the Other Silent Ones. It was human-shaped creatures made of matter and fully occupying our segments of time and space.

Lopsided men were rising up from doors and hatches in the stone, swarming up like ants from a disturbed hill. I saw their lumpish silhouettes against where lights of the Quiet City laid a path of shining across the Giant’s Sea, and flitting shadows moved across the peaks where firepits gleamed or ground-lightning flared. The creatures had one puny and misshapen arm, a crooked thing which would barely reach their teeth, and one huge and misshapen arm, longer than their legs. In his greater arm, each Lopsided Man carried some crude weapon, a bludgeon of iron, or a hooked spear.

There were scores of them on our trail, and then there were hundreds.

More creatures joined the route, were-worms and blind and hairless ape-bears, and a nest of things that slithered like centipedes.

Once a crablike monster scuttled out in front of us, but Dracaina merely leaped scrabbling up the rocky slope to one side, and outran the ungainly monster. Any of the Lopsided Men who came too close she snapped up in her jaws, and tossed them far away. Once she plunged into a stream of foetid water, and splashing hugely through the shallows, curtains of mud rising to each side of us, and then swimming through a deeper, cleaner section, where steam rose above a pungent scent. Many of the creatures pursuing us halted at the banks, growling and yelping.

When she reached the far bank, again her paws surged, and again we flew like the wind, outdistancing all pursuit.

We came suddenly upon the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk. I tugged on her mane and shouted for her to stop, for I saw, less than a mile from us, three figures draped in gray gauze standing on the road, their hoods turned toward each other as if they pondered a question together. With a flying leap we cleared the edge, pounded across the road, and leaped down into the ashy dunes of the smoking land beyond.

The nearest Silent One must have noticed our wild race across the open road, however, for a sensation of cold came upon us from behind in mid-leap, and I lost my grip on Dracaina’s mane. I fell and she fell also, sliding down a long slope of fine and choking ash, to lie in a motionless heap at the bottom.

I lost my helm in the darkness, and there was no way to find it. My pomander, my lethal means of escape, was gone. My weapon, however, was not far away from my body, and I could find in the dark because of the tugging on my soul.

When I could rise to my aching legs again, I slid and jumped and fell down that stinking ash pile, and was dirtied from head to toe. I touched my brother’s body with the haft of my Diskos, and felt a tremble of life-force still within.

I prodded Dracaina, and offered her tablets of nutriment. There are techniques to be used on one who has been Touched by Invisible Force, but they would harm a monster like her. All I could do was stroke her soot-coated head and call her name.

For I could not leave her. The Night Land was stirring; I could not lift my brother. Without her strength, death was sure.

And, yes, I must admit I admired the bravery and loyalty she had shown. How was it possible that a monster could be so true to a man? More true than Creon.

She stirred, and opened her blood-red eye. I admit I recoiled from it, that horrible serpentine eye, its slit pupil swelling wide: a nocturnal eye. Only human eyes are not like that.

At my urging she rose to her feet again, and again she knelt to me, and again let me mount.

I was impressed at her unnatural strength and vitality. I began to see why my brother loved her.

84.

The mighty Voice of the Home-Call sounded once more above the dark land. The Lopsided Men loping after me now scattered, some digging in the sand to bury themselves, some throwing themselves on their spears, slaying themselves just like a man would.

Dracaina paused in her graceful flight, and raised her monster head, nostril wide. The bristles on her back stirred and stood in my grip. She looked to the west.

There is a broad table land, coated with a glacier, which rises high above the country to the north of the Vale of Red Fire, west of where we paused. The dark, cold upland was silhouetted against the strange, opaque blue fire which forever issues upward from the plains behind it, and the lights from the Vale of Red Fire played across its steep sides before it, making the crevasses and tumbling cliffs a breathing texture of red and black shadows.

In that light I saw one of the Greater Powers move. It appeared at the top of the icy plateau, silhouetted against the blue glare behind. It was shaped like a hill of darkness, and surrounded by a black smoke or aura.

It paused as if it surveyed all land below with sensations or spirit-forces unknown to man, a blind hemisphere of trembling smoke.

My spirit quailed within me, since I could feel the power in the entity, even across all the miles separating us, even as one can feel the heat from the smithy’s closed furnace, and know that white hot flame is hidden beneath.

Now it descended, sliding down the slopes very swiftly, a hunched black cloud moving down the red-shadowed cliffs. Perhaps it moved on many small legs, perhaps it turned the matter beneath it to liquid, perhaps it moved by willpower alone, putting gravity aside as a lamp puts the darkness aside.

In a moment it slid into the darkness at the base of the slopes, away from the light of the Red Vale, and my eye could not see it, though my heart could feel the terror of it.

Dracaina leaped like ground-lightning toward the Last Redoubt. Her speed was double what she had previously done, and even her red eyes were wide with fear, and her black tongue lolled from her mouth. I smelled her squirt the poison out of her tail, and it randomly splashed across the sand behind us. Perhaps the instinct was meant to make her half a pound lighter; perhaps it was meant to carry dangerous fluid away from her, lest she be wounded, and her own poisons find her bloodstream.

We charged past the Great Watching Thing of the North East. It is so large, that it could grow and consume the world; which, I suppose, one day, it will. The great bell-like ear was quivering as we galloped past. In the glow from the circle of light hovering above its craggy brows, I could see the little scales patterning the outer part of the ear, the little network of veins and capillaries, as delicate as the veins on a leaf, on the inner part.

I saw, like a crescent moon, a pale shadow in the darkness above its cheek move from right to left. The thing’s face, if it can be called a face, was immobile, but one eye, if it has an eye, rolled in its socket as the Night-Hound raced past it.

It looked at me.

I heard the sigh of its breathing, a vast, slow hissing against its fangs and mouth-parts high above me.

I clung to the bristles of the monster, helmetless, lashed by my ash-stinking hair, with my head craned back over my shoulder, staring at that eye, that eye larger than a lake, which turned to look at me.

I could not close my eyes nor turn my gaze away. And yet it did not slay me. The monstrous indwelling spirit within that mountainside of flesh was greater even than the black smoky hill-thing pursuing me, and, had it bent its will upon me, surely I would have been Destroyed. And yet it did nothing.

Perhaps it thought I was a prisoner already of the Night-Hound, affixed to her back against my will. Perhaps it wished merely to have me more clearly in the view of the millions watching from the many windows of the Last Redoubt before I was Drained and Absorbed: such small cruelties are seen even in the greatest of the antihuman powers.

The thing—even the rituals of the mnemonicists cannot clear the memories utterly from my nightmares—the thing was so different than I had thought. It was actually alive, not moving. It breathed and its eye moved, just like a real eye. I had always assumed it was something more like a statue, or like one of our disk-ax weapons. Somehow I knew that it lived, without food or drink or movement, sustained by its own malice.

Dracaina now leaped up a slope of jagged rocks and reached a high level space, an upland plain, which reached to within a few miles of the base of the Last Redoubt. For a moment, it seemed way ahead was clear of foes: I saw no sign of the Dun Giants encamped against our Northern gate. Dracaina had traveled somewhat westerly as she ran, so their encampment must be a mile or more to the East.

I shouted in her ear to tell her the way to the gate, for only by that entrance to the Last Redoubt could I enter. My secret way was too far off, and I could not have pulled Polynices up the precarious ill-made stairs.

As we raced forward in the dark, we came suddenly upon a patrol of Giants, seven or eight traveling in a band; and they hooted and lifted their massive truncheons when we pounded up in a cloud of dust; but Dracaina simply threw herself against the nearest, knocking the vast creature from its elephantine feet and tearing away its throat. Two or three of the roaring shapes she dealt with likewise. The rest were not so near; those she outran.

A second patrol we came upon: the screaming was terrible, and the stench of blood was everywhere.

She fought as if inspired: she would not let them touch her master whom she bore.

We left a scattered group of giants bleeding and moaning behind us, and raced toward the pyramid.

85.

My spirit felt the horror behind me. I looked again over my shoulder.

The Vale of Red Fire is wide, and there are only a few accounts, some of them half a million years old, brought back by venturers who crept near to spy it out. At that time, there were two or three cities of half-humans breeding amid the warm soil and up-jags of rock between streams of lava-slough and there was an ironworks. The Vale is very wide, and its inner slopes are sheer, with no way down or up.

The hill of dark substance rose up across the lip of the pit as I watched, unimpeded, having traveled quickly across the lava streams and dead inhuman cities flooring the Vale in mere moments. On it surged, consuming the miles, and great floods of smoke streamed from its silent mass as it came.

Certain small valleys that it passed over, it merely filled with the black smoke it shed, nor did the high hump of its main body sink appreciably, so great was its size. Smaller clouds of sand and dust and black snow fled upward from its leading edge as it came, clouds that would have been sand-storms compared only to themselves, but which were merely footfall-dust compared to the advance of the Great Horror.

The entity passed over a platoon of the Dun Giants who could not scatter out of the way with sufficient alacrity. Where it passed over them, the living were swallowed up in its black aura without any sound or trace left behind. Some in their haste to escape clubbed their brothers before them. These dead were not absorbed, but their corpses were blacked and twisted where the shadow passed over them, as if by scalding heat or some strange chemical process.

I turned my eyes forward in time to see Dracaina came suddenly across a rise and plunged into the midst of the great encampment of the Dun Giants. Here was the ditch and the rampart, set with cyclopean stones, which she overleaped in a bound. I was faint with panic, for she had carried me directly into the strong place of the enemy.

All about were row upon row of low stone huts with their small round windows. The rock was dug up into pits and vents from which steam rose. All was laid out very orderly and warlike, as human persons might have done. The huts in rows, with cooking pits and smithies set at the crosspaths. Before every twentieth hut was an arsenal-pit where tripods of spears were stacked. In the center of the camp, a derrick of behemoth-bones lashed together held up a great platform, where signal torches and drums were hung, as well as a wide and blurry lens lashed into a circular frame, turned up toward the Last Redoubt, to observe us.

No countless army was here. This stronghold, which had oppressed our gates for so long, was empty. The round windows of the huts stared blankly at us as we swept through the deserted yards of the encampment.

Dracaina jumped from the top of the ramp to the ditch, and scrambled up the slopes, her paws smoking with little avalanches of dust. Then the encampment was behind us.

The giants in all their numbers had fled the approach of the Great Horror.

I looked back once more, and saw it looming over the encampment and swallow it up.

It rushed forward, as large as a mighty wave that drowns the hill tops of the Quiet City when earthquake or stirring of Forces in the Deep upsets the bed of the Scalding Sea.

Of a sudden, Dracaina turned sharply aside, but did not slack in her speed, even as the Hill of Darkness behind swelled up in my view, a lesser pyramid of darkness behind, seeming as tall as the great pyramid of light ahead.

The Electric Circle lay practically under the thundering paws of the Night-Hound. She could not cross it; neither could she slacken her speed, for the Horror was upon us, and its black tendrils of smoke beginning to reach down toward us. She was running parallel to the thin white tube shining in the ground, instead of directly away from the Humped Thing, and she could not maintain her distance from it.

Even had I wished it, there would have been no time to dismount, unload my brother, and step across the Circle to leave Dracaina outside to her fate.

And I did not wish it. Brave beast!

I said, “I invite over the circle the Night-Hound of Polynices, my brother. I grant permission. My soul is a human soul—“ and I spoke the Master Word, both with my voice, and with my brain-elements.

Dracaina slid across the Circle and the impalpable membrane of the Air Clog parted for her like the surface of a pool. The Black Thing behind swept many tendrils of its substance up to the very edge of the Circle, but the smoke flattened and turned left and right. The white light in the little tube of glass underfoot now flickered, and I saw the shining lights of the Last Redoubt above me turn brown and dim, and, in my teeth, I heard the laboring of mighty engines built into the huge base of our vast home, straining.

And the Hill of Black Smoke stood very nigh to the Circle, but did not pass over it.

Like the roar of an ocean, I heard the cheers of the Millions, cascading down from the embrasures above me, and the aether was shaken with joy.

86.

Where the Pyramid base corners, the White Circle is near the Pyramid. But I had crossed where the Pyramid is seen straight on, and the arch of the Circle is at its farthest point. The distance was hard to judge, for the base of the Pyramid is dark, and a skirt of shadow surrounds it, because no lanterns shine from the lowest half mile.

Mingled with the sound of the Millions amid the tumult of joy and cheering, I heard the chanting of Dracaina’s name.

The Last Redoubt had seen the bravery of the beast; mankind had watched her stand loyally by her master for so many months, and save my brother from despoliation, and me from terrible swift Destruction.

That chanting astonished me. For me to hear it, over such a distance, meant that tens of thousands, whole cities of folk, were in unison applauding the Night-Hound.

Surely they were now convinced of the wisdom of my brother’s plan. If not Dracaina, then some Night-Hound in the next fifty years, or the next five hundred, would be brought inside the armor, and raised as a loyal servant of Man, as the dogs in my brother’s dreams once were. The nature of Man is lonely, to live in the Last Redoubt, with nothing but butterflies and ladybugs for companionship. Could there be some primeval urge, a love between man and beast, which even the countless aeons of the Night could not entirely blot out?

I tugged on the neck-bristles and long leathery ears of Dracaina, urging her to slow and stop, now that the danger was past. But she did not stop. She ran toward the Pyramid swiftly.

“We’re safe! We’re safe!” I yelled into her ear. “The gate is yonder; I will tell them to let you in. There will be food and light and clear air for us, and surely Polynices will come back to life again! Surely he must!”

A shivering, shuddering overcame the noble beast. I felt a tumult in the aether.

She turned swiftly and reared up on her hind legs.

Draego, the other beast, the male, was there, racing toward us, growling in hate, bristling and yammering as he came.

The Circle had parted for him. I had spoken in haste, and had not said Dracaina’s name. The Hound of my brother, I said. He was one such as well.

Draego came leaping across the rocks, his hairs flattened by the wind of his swiftness. His eyes blazed like lanterns, and his jaws were as wide as a well, if a well had many concentric rows teeth. In a moment he was upon us.

Snarling and screaming, rearing, Dracaina stumbled backward, overbalanced. I clung to the body of my brother, and, by some quick reflex, severed the straps holding him to Dracaina’s hairy back with a stroke of my Diskos. The blade glanced off her shoulder-bone, drawing blood, but either the weapon energy was weak, or my invitation to cross the Circle had granted certain immunities, or the spirit in the blade recognized her loyalty to Polynices and wished not to slay her. The lighting did not stun her, and she rolled and came to her feet and threw herself against Draego, undistracted. Both my brother and I were crushed for a moment beneath her weight as she rolled across a snowdrift: my armor saved me, and his, him.

Dazed, I rose. For a moment only, I stood entranced by the bloody scene of the two great monsters gnawing bloody chunks from each other’s neck armor. As one, they twisted and struck with their tails: but Dracaina was dry. Draego’s tail jammed into the soft parts of her lower belly, and the bulbs on his tail pulsed as venom was pumped into her. She took his mighty fore-paw in her mouth, and twisted, pulled him off-balance. He fell with his neck exposed to her, but his stinger tail still lodged into her belly-folds.

She could have torn out his throat, but instead she raised her head high, as if about to utter the cry of the Night-Hound.

I extended the haft of my Diskos and spun the wheel, catching her in the throat before she could speak. This time, the blade-fire was bright, and all her limbs jerked as the Earth-Current, that substance so healthy for men, sent rivers of pain through her nervous system. The low roaring hum from my brother’s weapon was as fearful and stern as ever I was to hear such noise.

Draego, who was touching her, was shocked as well, and he jerked his tail free, and stumbled.

Hugely, on her rear paws, she stumbled back, gargling torrents of black blood. Bloody air whistled grotesquely from her lungs through the torn flaps in her neck as she tried to utter a cry.

Voiceless, she fell.

Two-handed I raised the heavy blade high, while the sparks and lightning played across the roaring wheel of the blade. I dashed it with my full strength into the bones and great veins of her neck. There was an explosion of noise. Again I hauled the heavy blade aloft with trembling arms, and again I struck; four and five and six times, until finally the head rolled free amid a horrid squirting of her neck-tubes. Her legs and paws flinched and trembled even after she was dead, and her stinger tail went in and out, like a wasp’s does after death.

The poets say that Andros the Great could decapitate a Night-Hound with one blow. Perhaps he was that much stronger than me. Perhaps poets are liars.

I stood for a moment, with my blade still lit and roaring, and the flare illuminated the dark scene before me. Where Draego’s tail had ripped open her belly, I could see amid the mess of blood, a swollen bundle, four or five of them. A litter of Night-Hound puppies, still in her womb.

Those young ones were few, but perhaps enough to form a breeding stock. I dashed my weapon among them, to assure myself of their deaths.

By this time, since I had tarried so long slaying Dracaina, Draego had climbed to his feet. He was sitting on his haunches, his head cocked to one side, watching me with a sardonic expression.

At that moment, behind him, rising into view, filling the black horizon, came a second of the Hills of Darkness, and then a third. Looming near to their brother, the three pressed against the invisible barrier of the Air-Clog, and sent tendrils reaching high and to either side, sinister elongating snakes of black smoke.

Again, the Circle flickered and faded a bit; again came the roar of machinery from the Pyramid, and dimming of the many millions of lamps on every level of the city.

I said to Draego: “They may break through, this time. My invitation might have weakened the Circle. Quickly! We must get to the gate, so that the Earth-Current can be released across this whole area, and drive back the Humped Things. The armigers will not wait long, not for me, and certainly not for you.”

He tilted his head to the other side, letting gape his jaws as if in a smile, and letting his black tongue loll out.

I said sharply, “Come now! I have penetrated your masquerade. Why do you think I struck at Dracaina, and not at you? Do you think an untrained and unprepared girl can wander here and there across the Night Lands, in plain and full view of the Crowned Watcher, and not be touched?”

The beast lowered its nose to the motionless body of Polynices, sniffing wetly.

I said, “You fought Dracaina in the pen, when the Castellan was about to agree to allow your master to breed Night-Hounds. So you slew the Castellan to prevent that agreement, before Dracaina could stop you. All those suspicions you tried so patiently to lull, letting Polynices raise you from a cub, killing your fellow night creatures, all were meant to introduce your kind into our Last Redoubt. Perhaps you could pretend to be domesticated for generations, hundreds of years, or thousands, until some signal came from outside or….” I studied his expression closely, trying to guess his mind. “Or until you understood us. Until you could say the Master Word yourself. But you will never understand us. We are creatures who risk all for love, and even eternity cannot stand against that power.”

I pointed at the body of my brother with my Diskos. “Help me get him onto your back. You must have actually started to feel something for him, in your black monster-heart. You fell into the role you were playacting. You fell in love with him. Didn’t you? That is why you betrayed the plan. That is why you slew Dracaina. To stop us from taking Night-Hounds into our defenses, to wake us from the mad dream that we could domesticate you. Come! You are intelligent, admit it! You can speak! Tell me I am correct!”

Draego lowered its massive jaws, closed them delicately, very delicately around the armored torso of Polynices, lifted him high, and began stepping toward the Pyramid.

At first the monster was content to keep pace with me.

Behind, the great hills of darkness strove against the subtle barrier, their hundred arms of darkness reaching for hundreds of feet left and right and arching tall in the gloom. Even through the straining boundary of the Air-Clog, I could feel the malice and inhumanity radiating from them.

There was motion on the balconies above me: many lights were cut as armor slid across several cities of windows, the lowest first. A shadow rose from the pyramid base and rippled toward the pinnacle as city after city, one above the next, sealed its armor. Engines to release the Earth Current, terrible and powerful machines from the ancient days, now opened their apertures. I saw turrets rotating to bring their aiming bores to bear. I saw flags signaling from balcony to balcony, no doubt calling platoons of harquebusiers to arms. The narrow beams of searchlights now glanced down from corner towers, and swept toward each other, converging.

The ground shook underfoot: energies were being gathered to hurl against the mighty Powers of Darkness which pressed against the laboring barrier of the White Circle.

I should have been mute with horror. To see the White Circle flicker with struggling dimness was something never before seen, not by me, not by any generation history records. As if a man of the ancient world were to see the Sun stagger and tremble in sickness in the middle of its flight across the clouds of heaven.

I should have been terror stricken that my word had weakened the mighty boundary.

Instead I was intent on the beast. “The Great Ones behind us there herded me across the Circle, forcing me to bring Dracaina. It was nicely timed, was it not? But you have spoilt their plan, and now they mean to crush us by mere force. Speak! Admit it is true! Your mind is like my own. We are both living creatures. Speak!”

Draego merely looked at me from the corner of his eye, while his mouth was bunched up around the motionless armored form of my brother, who hung between the monster’s teeth.

“Why do you serve them? They are not alive, as we are! Why do you attack us?”

His made no answer.

“Why do they attack us?” My voice caught in my throat. The question all humanity, every generation of us, has forever asked the darkness rose in my throat, but I spoke it in a whimper of fear: “Why? Why? What do they want of us? Why do we suffer?”

He laughed. Draego uttered a wheezing strange noise, but it was definitely a laugh.

He mumbled something. With my brother in his mouth, he spoke, but I could not clearly make out the words. He laughed his wheezing laugh again.

And then he was pelting forward, faster than a healthy man could sprint. In my weakened state, I could barely stumble after him.

He dragged the body of Polynices up to the crest of a large rock, large enough that one of the brilliant searchlights from the corner towers shined full upon it. Then, standing in the beam of light like an actor on a stage, he reared up. With a twist of his neck, Draego threw the body down, and began to savage Polynices with his claws.

I ran forward then, but I saw I was to be too late, too late.

Draego reared back again, and, at that moment, from a shuttered balcony half a mile above, a long ribbon of energy, the highly charged streamer from an harquebus, splattered against his huge chest with a noise like thunder, and threw him bodily off the rock, to tumble into the gray sand below.

To the left and right of the Night-Hound were low lumpish masses, which I took to be boulders hunched against the ground. They were not. They were men, who threw back their dun cloaks and stood, weapons lit and roaring in their hands.

I cried out above the din of the weapons: “No! Draego is loyal! He is faithful! Can’t you see he’s trying to deceive you so you won’t bring him into the gate?”

Draego scampered back up the rock, and the men ran in pursuit. One lone axman, who had climbed the rock from the other side, stood over my brother’s body, and when Draego loomed near, he raised his Diskos and struck. The light was dazzling.

With a savage yowling and spitting of black blood from his mouth, the monster reared again. Two other men smote from behind with their weapons, severing his spine and tearing flesh from his legs.

Draego toppled hugely, wounded in many places. He lay on the rock, his blood pouring down in smoking streams.

With his last strength, he lolled out his tongue and licked his master’s face.

Many blows of the Diskos landed at once, including one mighty blow that sheered off his head in one stroke.

By this time I was among the men at the base of the rock, blinded by tears, crying, telling them to stop. My words were loud and shrill and incoherent. I told them that he was trying to serve his master. Draego was doing what Polynices was not wise enough to do himself, to prevent his own race from ever entering into fellowship with our race. The beast was laying down his monstrous life, even to the point of hiding the fact of his loyalty, merely to serve his master one last time; serving him in a fashion wiser than even his master knew.

But these thoughts were too complex for the short, sobbing shouts I uttered then. They must have thought me hysterical.

The man who had severed the head of Draego now leaped lightly down the sloping side of the rock, and he took me in his arms.

Blinking the tears, I could not see his face, but I said, “Haemon! Haemon! I knew you would come rescue me! I knew you were brave enough! Now I will marry you, and Polynices will be at the wedding!”

It was my brother Eteocles. He shook me by the shoulders. “Haemon killed himself the moment the news came that you had ventured Out. His last words were of you, a final farewell. He said you did not love him enough to find him again within eternity, your other lives will never be together.”

One of the Watchmen said, “Sir, your brother is not dead. Look! My blade reacts when near him. The Night-Hound did not hurt him.”

“See!” I screamed. “They are loyal! They love him! Polynices shall live again!”

The men seized me and rushed back into the gate, running.

The most horrid moment of my life was that one moment, less than a heartbeat, when I thought they meant to leave the body behind. But then I saw Eteocles himself had taken up Polynices over his shoulder, and would let no other touch him.

He ran and reached the gate before me, handed our brother to the many gauntlets waiting there, and he stood by the open valve with his weapon out until I and all the men passed in. They called out the Master Word, one after another; when the company was counted, only then did Eteocles raise his weapon to salute to the Portreve who stood blank-faced with terror, by the valve-wheel. At the signal, he spun the wheel.

The valve was not entirely shut when a light brighter than any light of the world spilled through the narrowing crack, and a noise enough to deafen heaven roared.

The Earth Current was released against the enemy, and all the ground before the base of the pyramid was turned to fire.

87.

That was the first of many discharges. The bombardment lasted over the next forty hours, and the cities of mankind were without power and light, and all the lifts were still.

The Millions were prone with prayer and meditation, adding their human strength to the great spiritual battle.

Only I was not part of the great boiling force that shivered through the aether. I was in the self same holding pen, in quarantine, nigh to the lower gate, where Polynices and his beasts had been kept, and I sat on the metal floor, wiping my eyes and telling myself that Polynices would live again.

88.

Polynices did not come to life again. The physicians examining the body said that there was an unnaturally strong amount of residuum among the cells of his fingernails and hair, to which the blade of his weapon reacted. One of them theorized that some property of the Night Land had been preserving the body from decay, keeping an echo of living force within his dead cells for an abnormal length of time.

89.

The Country of Peace is the bottom-most of all the sublevels of the Last Redoubt, which reaches a hundred miles into the Earth. Here are all our fields and gardens, miles upon miles, each held in a layer above the next. This final level is a great and quiet place, with monuments to the beloved dead, and floral gardens arranged to their honor.

There is in the midst of it a low, white dome, very solemn, and a moving highway that draws one to it. Within this dome is the Crevasse, at those bottom depths the white supernal fires of the Earth Current can be glimpsed. Long golden shafts, rank upon rank, dip down into the Crevasse, for gold is the metal best suited to conduct the energy. These shafts by cunning machinery draw the power up and into the pillars and internal buttresses of the Great Redoubt, and send the vital force to all our cities, granting life to men. When it fails, the Last Redoubt falls, and the darkness will have a final and eternal triumph.

It is a gesture of defiance against that triumph that we commit our dead into the depths of the Crevasse. Perhaps the living force of the world helps the metempsychosis, which our lore says allows certain heroes to be born again in later ages.

Nothing had been changed since the time of Mirdath. The coffin of Polynices was like hers to the last detail, a capsule of substance harder and fairer than crystal. The pace of the road which drew him ever nearer to the Crack was the same.

Perhaps there were mourners. Perhaps Creon said a eulogy. I do not recall any details of this. I was watching his face.

I kept telling him to wake up. Like Mirdath the Beautiful woke up.

I asked him to wake.

As a kindness, and because the gathered crowds of well-wishers, noble and common alike, were staring at me in fixed embarrassment, Eteocles ordered the road halted. My guards undid the chains on my wrists and allow me to go embrace the coffin, and speak to Polynices one last time.

The silence grew longer and longer. Eventually, Eteocles pulled me away, and the road of silver-white, without any noise or vibration, slid the last yard.

The crystal coffin dipped its nose, and raised its foot high in the air, and paused a moment, while silvery beams from below played against the coffin-surface, jewel-like, luminous, wonderful.

Polynices fell.

It was silent. There was no noise of any thing striking any bottom, for the Crevasse is very great and very deep indeed.

My guards chained me up and led me away.

90.

At first, Eteocles saw to it that I was guarded by members of the Watch, rather than Cleon’s partisans. It was always members of that band which had ventured Out to rescue me and Polynices. These men were grim and soft-spoken, with a far-off look to their eyes no other possesses. I thought perhaps it was a sign of the spiritual discipline of the Preparation.

When I was finally escorted to the great lift from the quarantine cell, surrounded by these tall, broad-shouldered men in gray armor, a crowd had gathered on the lift to watch me.

My escorts drove the civilians off the lift, high and low alike. Nobles, elite Contemplatives, or Monstruwacans were ordered out of my path. Armed partisans with shining pilums were pushed aside. No matter how much space was on the lift platform, these Watchmen allowed no one to share it with me, save for themselves.

Not even cadets of their own order were allowed. Any officer of higher rank, including the Deck Officer for my home city, merely inclined his head and stepped aside when I was brought in.

No one told me what it meant, but I knew. I saw it in the faces of the crowd. It differed from the curiosity and fear crowds show the high-born as flattery differs from honesty.

Despite that there were chains on my wrists, and that I was small of stature and slight of build, the tall and valiant men of the Watch knew I was one of them. Despite that I was a woman.

We had walked the Night Land.

91.

The Monstruwacans had many questions for me, and I answered them all as honestly as I could.

The one who seemed to be in charge of the questioning (for he had authority to order the others to depart, and he would linger to pester me) was an excitable little man named Ctesiphon, whose special study was the chemosynthesis of geothermal vent-worms. He would pull his gray beard in frustration whenever there was some detail, well known to all those who are Prepared, some nuance of color or shape by which various breeds of vermin are distinguished, which he asked about, but which meant nothing to me. He seemed astonished that any one born in the Pyramid could not distinguish trilete and the monolete spore-types at a glance, and thought me mentally deranged when I said I had not thought to bring back for study samples of the spikemosses found along the banks of the Hot Stream near the House of Silence. My observations were insufficiently scientific to grant them a place in the Great Log, but they were true and undisputed, so it was decided to record them into the Annals.

I remember I asked him once why he bothered to record my testimony: “None of you believe me. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. One will, one malice, one purpose, moves all the powers in the Night Land against us.”

Ctesiphon said, “My lady, no one can doubt that seven of the Greater Powers beheld you as you crossed the Land, and spared you. By the time you stood and flashed your weapon and shouted your brother’s name, not eight miles from the House of Silence, and were not slain, even the most skeptical of us were convinced that something was preserving you.”

I said, “Such was my guess at the time, but I tried to keep it away from the forefront of my thoughts, lest the Ulterior Ones be aware that I had pierced their masquerade, and find no further use for me.”

He made a note of that, nodding, and then he said: “The opinion is divided whether the Dark Powers acted to spare you, that you might betray our Pyramid to their plan, or whether one of those mysterious Good Powers was hovering near you, unseen, keeping the malignancy at bay. When you rode in front of the Crowned Watcher, and it beheld you, all our needles jumped, and atmospheric microphones recorded a voice that sang a song of great beauty, coming from somewhere in the smoke clouds overhead. Perhaps there is something above those clouds, which acted to hinder the Watcher.”

I said, “It was not a Good Power which persuaded Dracaina to trick me to open the Circle for her. It was her cunning. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. I saw the sense in her behavior. I heard Draego speak.”

He shook his head. “Unlikely. Limophoitos is a simpler explanation: fasting-delirium. Your mind strained to make sense of throat-noises which meant nothing.”

“No: it was a message.”

“What did it say? The monster, I mean.”

“ ‘One word away’.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have had many nightmares about it, and finally the meaning became clear. Draego was saying that Dracaina, invited over the boundary of the Circle, was about to raise her mouth and call out an invitation to the Black Things. The physical barriers of our armor could not have stopped these Greater Powers, which are only partially in our continuum. It would have meant sudden, absolute, and instant annihilation of mankind. Death for us all, if she had spoken the proper word to open the Circle. One word away. She was opening her mouth to speak when I cut her throat.”

I was expecting him to roll his eyes. How convenient that the madwoman who breached our gates just so happened to save us all! But he took the comment soberly.

He shook his head. “Let us suppose that the monster was occupied by a sending, or by some other art had been granted a temporary intelligence. It could not have uttered the Master Word with its brain-elements. The Circle would not part, not for it.”

“Polynices treated them with human love. Perhaps he taught them the Master Word.”

“Rubbish.”

“Perhaps being raised by Man, the monster-beast actually learned love and loyalty, and so could understand the Word.”

“Rubbish.” He snorted. Then, remembering who I was: “Ah, excuse me, my lady! I mean; that is not in accord with the received wisdom, my lady.”

“You stopped taking notes. Are you going to write down Draego’s last words?”

He shrugged. “We don’t write down what the Voices in the Darkness say, my lady. They speak only to deceive. But, I will write your ladyship’s account, and your theory, because later generations will know more, and their aeon will judge the true and false of it, not ours.”

“Yet it is true. There is a single malignant will which guides all the horrors against us.”

“Mandragore the Eschatologist is the ancient authority whose opinion is most respected in the area: and he avers that the Night Land acts with greater unity of purpose, and grows more cruel and subtle, whenever a daughter of Man ventures into the Outer World.”

I said, “Why?”

“No one knows why. The monograph of Abrasax has been indicted as heretical, but it claims the Night Land is merely a projected materialization of our gathered fears. But if his theory is correct, we could deduce that women, whose spiritual strength is known to be greater than that of men, merely by walking the land, would more greatly feed the Powers there, and make them grow more terrible. The orthodox opinion, following the writings of Bellona and Autonoös, is that the feminine nature is more sacred than the masculine, and creates a greater desecration, more useful to the enemy, when it is degraded. The enemy does not wish merely to kill our bodies, you know.”

I asked angrily: “And how would anyone have discovered this? Since no woman, ever, has walked the Night Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful, and save me?”

“You were not the first, nor was she, though we suppress the tales of prior women who violate the law, lest ambitious maidens like you take heart.”

“You suppress the truth!”

“My Lady,” he said, bowing. “When the truth becomes a weapon in the hand of the enemy, it loses its sacred character. When love compels you to acts so heedless that all human life is set in peril, even love becomes an abomination, an abhuman thing, rather than a perfect culmination of our spirit.”

92.

The entries were filed under my name. I was brought up out of my cell to the Affirmation Hall to read and confirm the entries, and affix my seal magnetically, and with the concentration of my brain-elements.

It was a grand and stately hall, hung with somber black and green, to symbolize the outer dark and the inner gardens. All the Masters of the Order were present, as well as a number of Archivists, Librarians carrying their ceremonial lamps, Foretellers with their chains of office, Scholars, Antiquarians, and even two Aediles of the Architectural Board, measuring rods in hand.

THE TESTAMENT OF ANTIGONE. The scrivener applied the words, and the witnesses applied their seals. That terrible and insulting name now would be preserved as long as history; as long as the Last Redoubt should stand. I raised my eyes to see the great calendar that hangs above the Archives. Four million years of history remained to be recorded, and the blank books on their pedestals, numbered and arranged, stood to my left, many fewer than the filled books of history to my right.

In the Vestry, after the ceremony was done, I asked the prentice Monstruwacan who escorted me about all this: how could I, who had disgraced every law of mankind, be granted so honorable a mention, my name written in the books of eternity?

The young prentice just smiled. “Oh, we don’t care about that jabber,” said he, meaning my treason, all my adventures. “These records are meant to last.”

He meant last beyond the time when every rumor of our era, all our accomplishments and follies, had been utterly forgotten.

There is something comforting about the Monstruwacans. Their studies set them apart from the petty and quotidian concerns of other men.

93.

The Master Monstruwacan himself came down to interview me once. His was the shortest interview of all.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?” I said, wishing there was a more original way to phrase that question.

“You know what I wish to know.”

“Ah!” I nodded.

I described the second figure standing behind the leaf of the door in the House of Silence, its hood turned toward the first figure. The second figure has its hand stretched out, palm inward, as if beckoning or entreating the first figure, but hanging oddly just above the tips of its thin fingers is a pinpoint of colorless strange light, motionless, unflickering.

I told him. “The Bianitorianist theory is correct.”

He nodded. “We will move the observation of Aetius into the endorsed category.”

There was nothing else he wanted from me. He gathered his dark robes about him and stood, departing without a word. My life or death was too brief an event to interest him.

So perhaps there is something not so comforting about the Monstruwacans after all.

94.

I do not even know why Creon went through the meaningless ritual of an Inquest. The three magistrates of the Tribunal were all his men, puppets who owed their places to him. The common people (whose love of ancient tradition is always greater than that of the rich, for poverty makes men fearful, and fear breeds caution) were demanding I be skinned alive, and my flesh nailed up next to the felon whose hide is still displayed, a grim sight, on metal pegs on the inner side of the Great Gate.

Even his half-mythic crime was not so heinous as mine: for I had violated the prohibition against women, and also I had invited the enemy across the protections. Some electrospiritualists believed that the weakness of the boundary was permanent, lodged in the racial unconsciousness, and certain to influence the energy flows of the machinery feeding the White Tube from henceforth.

The nobles had no reason to speak on my behalf. I had brought a shame on my phylum; indeed, some said I discredited the whole theory of dividing mankind into phyla. A thousand or two thousand years from now, my name would be used as the final word in any argument against entrusting the high-born with special privileges to compensate for their special duties.

So there they sat, the magistrates, foolish looking in their antique tall caps, reciting in tedious detail the facts we all knew to be the case, driving to the decision we all knew must come forth. Our laws forbid the penalty of death, since it is not right that man should kill man, not in a world where the dark creatures are so eager to make us inhuman. But I knew they would find some way.

When it was my turn to speak, I spoke my many bitter thoughts, and condemned the cowardice of all my kin. Oh, I poured my scorn on them, these Watchman of the law who had no loyalty to the law. They were not even as loyal to the law as the Night-Hound I had seen die by his master.

I said the many things no well-bred lady is ever meant to say; but I knew they meant my death, and so I had no reason to hold my tongue. I called upon them all to end this farce, and ask Creon, in his tyrannical, untrammeled power, how my death would be accomplished.

There was a man in the court who took notes to tell the hour-slips the news. He was the only one who smiled at my speech; but he was relishing the fame his lurid account would bring to him, I am sure.

Creon took me at my word, and stood, and spoke. He pretended he was merely advising the court. It was within their power to limit my movements; a punishment called cloister, but also called by its older name of incarceration. He said there were cities on many levels of the pyramid, which had been lacking in light and power, heat and mess distribution, for centuries.

Up until that moment, I expected them to call for my voluntary suicide by some graceful means, a stiletto-stroke to the neck. Or I thought they would have the physicians prepare a room awash with deadly radiations, into which I would walk of my own accord, and lay down painlessly as if for sleep.

But Creon grimaced at me, and spoke of the sanctity of life, and of how it was forbidden that any should exanimate a human soul.

Oh, that terrible smile. He finally had his way. He finally won the dispute he’d begun with my father so long ago. I was not to be executed. I was to be deprived of food and light, and simply be allowed to die.

Even the Magistrates were shocked. “Must so terrible a sentence be executed? The girl is of tender years...”

Creon said, “There is no evil worse than disobedience.”

The look in his eyes was so glad and so terrible! And yet I saw, or thought I saw, the look of piercing shame in them as well, as if even he were astonished by the enormity of what he was about to do.

Who am I to blame him? That restlessness which made the second race of man venture forth to found the Lesser Redoubt, which made Mirdath able to cross the Night Land when all others of her people perished, which made Polynices or Labdacus our ancestor willing to dare what no one else dared: that is what I saw in his eye. There are some walls never meant to be breached, lest the darkness enter in and destroy us. I was too much like him, Uncle Creon. When our gazes met for the last time, I think he saw that thought in me, and knew it to be true. It was his gaze that wavered and dropped, despite that I was led away in chains, and he in pomp.

How had Andros done it? The first ancestor of our line had been possessed of this same restless, anarchic spirit, the pride that will not bow. He dared what no others would. How had he tamed that spirit, and rode its back as if on a monster, to glory, and not to shame?

They took me to a dark, large place, a dead city, and buried me alive, sealing large slabs of armor across the doorways and lifts.

The city was named Ventral Southwest Nine.

95.

The city where I have been banished is empty. The doors and hatches leading in and out of this aeons-old metropolis were sealed shut sixty years ago, with me alive inside.

There are other cities above and below me, to the north and south and east and west, but whatever the noises of their multitudes, their celebrations and lamentations, their duties and their leisure, I am cut off. I neither hear their solemn paeans during the Contemplation, nor their gay applause during the Games. There are no windows and no openings peering Out: this is one of the interior cities, near the axis of the Last Redoubt.

They meant me to die, of course, the long, slow, painful death of starvation. They meant for me to go mad in the place without lights, where I could keep no count of time. But the air is sweet here, and the water in the public fountains and baths is pure, and so I conclude that the eternity-circuits have been set to replenish the air and water. They did not mean me to die of dehydration or asphyxiation: such would have been too quick.

Neither did they search carefully this city, and discover all its sealed and buried secrets. Creon assumed, as we all did, that the supplies and the power cores, the granaries and stock-templates would all be kept in some central strong house, protected by the civic guard, as they are in all the cities on the other inhabited levels of the Pyramid in the current aeon. So, after sweeping the main public buildings in the center of the square with their wands, the gaolers declared the space uninhabitable, empty of victual, that the terms of my short exile be complete.

And perhaps the search was less than thorough. With listless steps and sullen glances the young recruits went through their motions. They were of that age when their nature is to be courteous and doting, shy and bold, and their martial instincts told them to protect women and children and gentle-born ladies; and I was all three. Their sense of chivalry told them to admire the heroes who walk the Night Lands; and I was one of these as well.

A clerk whose name I did not even know was the last human person to speak to me. He read the proclamation: “You, who have betrayed and rejected the service and society of mankind, breaching our quarantine and trafficking with powers devoted to the destruction of all mortal life, are by these presences banished and exiled beyond the reach of humanity for weal or woe.”

And then, with a gesture, the clerk ordered the company to douse their lamps. I heard their footsteps march away; I heard the clang of the portal being shut; the process they used to seal the armored slab in place made no noise, of course.

96.

So many years ago, that was.

The month I had spent in beneath the ground in utter darkness, in the Place Where the Silent Ones are Never, in a city much older and more horrific than this, had given me the skills, the temper of mind, I needed to survive here. I was not without hope, for I knew nowhere in the whole Last Redoubt is entirely free from the protective flows of the Earth Current. Somewhere in this sealed-off city, I would find a working circuit; somehow, I would find or build a lamp.

The people who once lived here had ways strange to ours, lives not so regular. I imagined it was a time of peace and prosperity: for each mansion, each cotter’s cabin, practically each cell, has its own independent power supply, its own storeroom filled with tablets of nutriment, or fruits or life-paste turned sideway in time so that it cannot rot.

It was twenty months of work, all by myself, crawling without light through ancient libraries, puzzling out their languages and thought-forms, to find texts on lantern and power technology. It had to be written to instruct a layman, and coded to be read by the blind.

My first two or three decades of loneliness were occupied, as you might expect, with survival chores. It was years to learn the basic arts of farming once I had the lamps burning in the ancient greenhouses, and the soil-nitrate generators sweeping the black hydroponic beds with their healing rays. I broke open preservation cells to get at fruits and grain, and found the enzymes and long-chained molecules I needed in little airless nodules in a biochemical museum.

97.

For many years, I survived as might any prisoner with nothing but time to torment her.

I draw calendars on the walls, and pictures, and wrote notes in the endpapers of books I found in the library.

Of course I went mad.

98.

I studied the dead city, inventing the names of those who must have lived there, making up details about their lives and histories based on the ancient artifacts I found, or any thought-archives still working after a million years of non-use.

Soon I was hallucinating them, telling them my tale, and these phantoms seemed as real to me as my life before.

I had a celebration when I turned Two-and-Thirty, for, at that date, I had spent as many years in solitary prison as I had in freedom up until then. I was a maiden of sixteen when they buried me alive in here.

I intended to end my celebration by hanging myself from the chandelier of some ancient magnate’s feasting hall I’d found, and I had the harness ready for my neck, when the imaginary people I’d been eating with asked me to wait, and the ghosts I saw asked me, first, to tell them the tale of how I came here.

I have dreams that I am riding swiftly through the Land of Darkness, on the back of a monster, with my brother’s corpse slung across the great beast’s neck. To have such a dream as this is my greatest joy, for I delight in the sensation of the ride, the power of the mount, the swift motion across the cursed landscape. In the dream, my brother’s head rotates oddly on its neck, and smiles at me vacantly, and touches my face with his cold fingers, telling me I will soon be with him. Nonetheless, the sensation of freedom and escape which this wild ride promises make such dreams precious to me.

99.

What was your question, again?

No, child, that was years ago.

When I turned Four-and-Sixty, I made up my mind again to do myself in, and seek another life, if the tales of reincarnation are not lies. And so I bit down on my forearm where those who venture Out have their capsule implanted. My teeth could not find it, and so I bit again and again, until my arm is as you see it now.

No, I did not gnaw it clean off: what a foolish question. I found the infirmary many years ago, and restored its basic circuits to operation. The voices in my head told me the wound showed gangrene, and I told the automatic surgeon to amputate.

That is a strange thing to say. You are an hallucination yourself. You exist only in my eyes, only in my imagination.

Well, I do not mind telling you how I know. My dream about you began as other dreams have: a month ago, I found a spot on the great wall separating this city from the next, warm to the touch. After a week or so, a little red dot of fire appeared in the middle of the slab, and it grew over the next period of time, bigger each time I came back.

I decided to have a celebration to welcome you when you broke through the walls, and that is why I have gathered my treasures here.

Rubbish? Why, what a thing to say, child.

Here is my collection of metal needles. You must know how hard these are to find. I used to have ladies to sew for me, and I had to learn all this myself. This stick is from my first apple tree. This cup of earthworms is not rubbish: my life comes from these humble insects, for without them, the soil in my gardens would still be sterile. These are my friends. I have given them names.

You simply do not know what is important, Little Boy.

Yes, I will look at your treasures.

What kind of glass is that? I see. You are hallucinating also, I suppose. The Soul Glass is a forgotten art. We have no way to restore the mind to sanity, the spirit to temperance and virtue. The last of these was broken six hundred years ago. Certainly I will look.

I see the face of a strange old woman wearing a sack. Her eyes are so wild, and her hair, what a mess! No, that is not my face, for my hair is dark, not white, and it shines like dark ink. It is one of the signs of my bloodline.

And my teeth are white and fine, not yellow crooked stubs like that. My fiancée is Haemon; he would never kiss a mouth like that. He will come for me, some time, you know.

I see my nervous system now. The dark areas do indicate a need for repair.

That light! Is that my essential self? It is corroded like a ripe fruit. Vanity, ambition, willfulness, I see. But what is that golden thing shining in the depth, that beautiful color?

I see my memories. Years of darkness, years of bitter imprisonment. And before that? A time of joy. I was to be married to a handsome lad; my brother was a hero, the greatest of our age. My father was the Castellan.

Yes, I will tell you the tale.

The monsters still howled for him, months after he fell…

100.

The boy has told me who he is, but the broken thing in my head makes me forget. The joy is too much, and my mind rejects it.

Now he focuses his glass upon me, and his words come sharp and clear, in a fashion I can neither misunderstand, nor forget. Already I feel my wits returning.

The clarity is nothing but pain. I wish myself blinded with pride again.

Ah me! What have I done? Did I nearly destroy all the millions of man merely to save but one?

101.

Antigone, hear me. In a former life, I was your brother Polynices.

That light you see in the deep places of your soul is that love, that selfless love, you had for me in life. Once you are whole, you will see the flaw in your spirit, a restless pride and heedlessness; but I will not condemn you, for love purifies flaw, and sets all to rights.

Pride is our legacy from Mirdath the Beautiful; devotion is our legacy from Andros. His blessing is meant to annul her curse.

Because of your love for me, I was permitted to return here ten thousand years before the appointed time. All unknowing, you and you alone drew me across the abyss, and I was born again within the same generation. The exposure of my corpse to the Earth Current gave me the strength. Had I been Destroyed by the powers in the Night, no life of mine would ever have returned, not in any aeon.

For you, it has been seven decades. For me, seventy lifetimes, spent both in the immensity of the future and the immensity of the past.

In one of those lifetimes, I was an adept of the Soul Glass; in another, an artisan who made them; in the third, a Mind-Doctor; then a fourth, a prophet and seer. Armed with much lore of past and future lives, I am born now into this time to undo the harm done by me and mine.

This time, this last time, our tragedy, repeated in many ancient lives, ends more happily, for I mean to bring a sip of hope to wash away the oceans of despair.

For I am the long-awaited messenger to this era.

The age of the Castellans shall pass. I know the things past and the things to come, and shall teach this generation what it has forgotten. No more will men rule men: we return to the ancient ways, the sanity that needs no law other than right reason to govern it.

Although I am of tender years, already there are some who follow my message. My men are burning wider that small hole through which I came, and they bring machines to open the armored wall. See! Already this tomb is being pulled wide.

Go up. Go up into the light. You are no longer alone.

Silence of the Night

Circa AD TWENTY-FIVE MILLION

(Three million years before the final extinction of mankind; fifty thousand years before the Fall of the Last Redoubt)

102.

I was overcome with awe, and fell to my face when I saw the Chronomancer walking slowly toward me along the balcony.

To my right, the thought-amplifying spyglasses looked out from the great embrasure upon the darkness and strange fires of the Night Lands, and I could see the shining eyes of the Great Watching Thing of the Southeast looking at me. The Thing was as mighty as a mountain, and about its forepaws, which had not moved in a million years or more, was encamped an army of Blind Ones, of Ogres, and of shaggy subhumans, of which more than half had stirred from the six thousand year paralysis, and had been stirring since the days of my grandfather's youth, and the reddish haze of severe space-distortion was all about them.

To my right, above me and below me were the other balconies, the windows and lamps of the Home of Man, and the Tower of the Monstruwacans, the monster-watchers, rose another mile above the topmost embrasures of the highest balconies. No other humans were nearby, not for miles: the cities of this level, and the ones below and above, had been deserted for half a million years. The cities were silent except for the whisper of the perfect machinery built by an ancestral people, and were empty of thought-action, except for those paeans known to hinder powers of the outside, soul-vibrations taken from the thought-records of departed sages of greatest spiritual power and wisdom. He and I were alone.

103.

Once, when I was but a youth, I dreamed of the days of light. A vessel of wood, like a charger, but great enough to hold many men, was shattered on the sea: the crew was treading water, and with loud voices they called to each other, each man telling the other as he sobbed to remain strong and hopeful, and await the dawn.

In the dream this seemed no wonder, though I later would regret I had not slept long enough to see this marvel of the ancient world.

My father was in my hands, and he was weary and cold, and I gripped him, calling out his name, although the bitter sea wave entered my mouth whenever I spoke.

There were sharks in the waters, drawn by blood, and, one by one by one, the men to my left and right were yanked below the surface. The inconstant moon appeared and disappeared between silver-edged black clouds: and sometimes I would see the silhouette of some mate or well-liked crewman bobbing on the heaving waves. But then the water would rise and fall between us, and I could not see, or the moon would hide. Then, a moment later, there was fitful light again, and whoever I sought was gone. They made no screams as the jaws pulled them under, for they were too weary.

I remember the salt sea and the deadly cold. I remember trying to pull the wizened body of my father up onto my back, as if I could somehow lift him away from the sea. All I did was to push my own face below the dark waters.

104.

When I woke, the dreaming glass registered a time-tension of over twenty-five million years, farther by three aeons than any accurate records reached, farther than previous paleochronopathy had recovered through thought-echoes. Even the master academicians, dwelling in the egg-shaped crystal thought-chambers of their guild, their minds augmented by surgery and magnified by coherent streamers of Earth-Current, could not penetrate the spirals and angles of time so deeply as I, when merely an untrained boy, unaided, had done.

I knew then that my life was marked: if foretellers had not foreseen someone of my power, after-tellers, those who walk through the memories of their ancestors, would return from the future to seek me.

I was not entirely surprised. In a sense, I had been long awaiting this visitation.

105.

Did I say I was alone, fallen prone before the stranger from another aeon? Not alone. None within this Last Redoubt can be alone. Our enemies are ever with us, unsleeping, tireless, horrid.

The Final Siege of Man has been since eight and a half million years ago, or so run the estimates of Paleochroniclers, who study those books written by earlier versions of the human race.

Uncounted millions of years before that, a great lamp stood in the upper darkness, called Sun. So long ago that only the time-dreams of the strongest mystics can confirm it, this lamp was quenched to an ember, removing all the light from the outer lands. Then came the hosts of Dark, seen and unseen. Between upper and nether and surrounding darkness, the terrors are encamped against us, patient beyond the limits of eternity.

The Great Redoubt stands seven miles and more, a mighty pyramid hulled in imperishable metal lit with a million lamps, above the haunted cold waste of the Night Land; and from our balconies, by the flares from firepits or by the smolder of volcano-flows, we see the beings move, those that can be seen to move, or loom in the darkness, large as living hills, motionless and watching, those that cannot. Beings from the far side of the life spectrum move also, but at so glacial a rate, that tens of thousands of years span the slowness of their approach against the walls of this last fortress of mankind.

On the low hill to the North stands the august and terrible House of Silence. Through the millions of years since the Watching Things have encamped against us to beleaguer our mountain-overtopping fortress, this small House of Silence has issued no sound, and not even the most sensitive of long range microphones have detected a whisper. There are lights seen in the casement, and yet these never move nor flicker, not in all of eternity. The main doors stand open. It is known that men lost in the darkness of the Night Lands will walk as if asleep into those open doors, and never speak or make a sound: those who enter do not emerge. The instruments of the Monstruwacans detect that this House is the center of the fields of influence that trouble the aether for many miles across the Night Lands, and most scholars agree it is the center of all the forces arrayed against us.

A silence filled the Night Land now. I could see the eyes of the Southeast Watching Thing scrutinizing the two of us. The yammering of the kiln giants was diminished, the pounding of their machinery which heats their buried dormitories; the Things Which Peer ceased to stir atop their half-unlit headland, and their hooting was quiet. The baying of the Night-Hounds ceased. A great hush seemed to fill the night. The lopsided ear of the Watching Thing to the Northwest could be seen, huge and motionless, against the dreary glow of the firepits beyond it. Surely our words did not escape that terrible, watchful malice.

Perhaps he and I could have removed to the center of the pyramid, or to the spot one hundred miles below our feet, where the deepest of our many buried acres of farms and gardenlands rest. It would have made no difference. The influence of the House of Silence was not impeded by mere solid objects.

106.

“Exulted, how is it that I feel fear?” I spoke without raising my eyes, wondering at myself. “The passion is one we left behind long ago, once mankind achieved the icy purity of perfection.”

The man from the future stood still when I addressed him, and I saw the hem of his shining robes and the gleam of his boots on the metal deck. He said only, “You know the answer.”

I did. The emotion was meant for me. Even in the sober mind-discipline my race had practiced for these last two million years, it was known that mere detachment held particular dangers.

Hatred forever battered the energized sheathe surrounding the Last Redoubt, in endless tides of malefic will pouring in from remote inhuman sources, from alien spheres in distant space and from other configurations of the time-structure, and to this was added tides of something more bitter than hatred crossing the abyss from dimensions ulterior altogether to time and space. Intellectual serenity was not the best defense.

Long ago the secret of the Night Hearing had been accomplished, so that every child of the race was trained in its use, on conscious and subconscious levels, and the thinking machines that organized our webs and tapestries of thought were designed to impress upon us only those emotions and only in the degrees thought wisest and best for the mental health of our diminishing community. We still retained individual minds, for too intimate a unity had dangers of its own: but our souls were so often visitors within the thoughts and memories of others; even as often as friends visit the houses of friends, we entered each other's beautiful thoughts: and our love and understanding was so deep, that it was as if each of us had many mansions of personality in our minds. We were not one soul, but we shared much that men of earlier eons never could share.

The Mind Song determined that I should feel fear, that most ancient sensation of life. I said, “ It is fitting and proper that a man should quail at a ghost.”

Perhaps I was the only man left who could feel fear. Of all the retromancers, I of all my generation had passed furthest back down the slope of evolution, into even prehuman forms, and pre-animal, far back into the past life of the cells and viruses in the human body, and I had achieved even unto the simple soul of the first amoeba, that primal thing of ooze, smaller than a pinpoint, born in a flare of sky-lightning, whose origins even the sages cannot fully explain. The first ancestral cell knew nothing but light by day and darkness at night: but even before the development of the most primitive nervous system, the chemical contractions of the night produced the sensation higher animals experience as fear. Fear of the dark is the oldest of things.

“I am not a ghost," he said, “but a man, like you, Aeneas. Rise!”

“Not like me," I said.

“Rise, in any case.”

Slowly I stood. I looked him in the eye, but his eyes were strange.

“How can you be here?” I asked him.

“But you know that answer as well," he said sadly. The shape he occupied was healthy and of good limb and proportion as the cellular science could make us, hale and strong even after decades of life. His eyes were not like ours, for the Mind Song did not pulse in him: he was in communion, perhaps, with his people, our remote descendants, across the abyss of time. Perhaps they watched now through his eyes.

107.

I knew his face. The countless millions who once occupied the seven-mile-tall structure of the Last Redoubt were, in these times, reduced to a few hundred thousand, and each knew each. Heliogabalus had been a prognosticator of my class and aspect, though he walked in his dream to find the future, not the past. He sought too well, and when he woke, one of our descendents woke with him.

“You are a possessor," I said, “This is very near the arts of the Enemy.”

“Not so, for the Watching Things and the Powers who set them to Watch consume the soul and destroy the inmost self: whereas I am come consuming only my own being, that those of this time may have extra years, a different fate. Heliogabalus is my host and landlord, not my victim.”

I said, “You are like me. A student of retromancy.”

“Not like you," he said with a small smile. “Your fame lasts even through legend to my day. Our word for one who is unsurpassed in the mystic sciences is your name.”

“Yet this present is your past. Do we seem grand to you? Or diminished? Have you come to admire arts lost to your time, or to smile at simplicities you have over-topped? Is there nothing but darkness ahead? Is there hope?”

His eyes shined with the Mind Song of another time, another race of man.

“There is no hope known to me.”

108.

I was of the Seventeenth Men, the penultimate race of mankind. He was of the Eighteenth and the Last, in spirit if not in form.

Many times over the millennia, mankind has reached the pinnacle of evolution, a harmony of spirit sustained by beneficent etheric and astral sciences, while our neural systems were tinkered over generations to perfection by neuropsychiatry and abnegatory disciplines: in each period of history the pattern was repeated. At first, our ancestors conquered insanity, and then they slowly learned to dwell without immorality, and all slavery and theft and coercion was left behind, childhood sickness; and then, seeking higher perfections still, the race would achieve the mystic union of the earth-energies, the balance of forces of past and future.

Some of these golden ages lingered but a thousand years; some, multiples of millions.

Yet the machinations of the Enemy, or some inner weakness of the human frame, or mere ambition, or a disturbance in the cycles of incarnation and reincarnation, sooner or later would disrupt the delicate checks and balances of our neural-moral laws and impulses. One such age was ended when a freakish storm in the aether stirred up madness and abomination in our ancestral nerve cells. Another failed due to a diminishment of power from the Earth-Current.

Many were halted more gracefully, when a messenger from the future came to warn the generations that their current stage of evolution was complete. So it was when the Sixteenth Men gave way to the Seventeenth, and, earlier, so it was when the Neanderthals, the Second Men, without war gave way to Homo Sapiens, the Third race of Man.

In our case, some forty thousand years of dark ages passed before the lost perfection was found again: in the case of the Third Men, far longer, for they killed the prophets sent to them from the future.

When Heliogabalus spoke, I understood the dark impulse of the Third Men of long ago.

109.

He spoke: "There is no hope known to me. For all of time mankind have known how the final siege would end. The rate of the diminishment of the Earth-Current has been calculated to within an erg-second since the time of the Fifteenth Men, and even the Fourth Men, those strange, cold thinkers composed entirely of brain, estimated within nine hundred years the date of the extinction of man.”

“Then why are you here now, ghost of the Things To Come?”

“I am come that my times shall not come. I speak, and this alters the past, and I destroy myself and all my people, every generation back to this point in time.”

I listened with growing horror. I wondered if I cast myself from the balcony even at this moment, and dashed myself to death against the armored walls, before another word were spoken, if it would keep future history on its destined path, and save the next generations of man, our children, from the unimaginable condition of never-having-had-been.

110.

His words were like the solemn toll of a bell. “We have consulted with the dead, who are not anchored in time as living men are. They grow ever fewer, for the after-life condition is not immune from the assaults of the Final Siege, and it loses integrity when living men diminish. Nonetheless, the parliament of the departed have arranged a set of signals to commune with us, and they believe the alternate which will come into being when I slay my people will ensure an additional five thousand years of human life and sanity upon this long-dead world.”

“How can the dead speak to the living?” I asked. “How can you meddle with your past? If these events are changed from fate's decree, you will not have and never will have had come to be: therefore your acts, your speaking to me here, is paradox.”

“Eternity is sick and trembling as a man with palsy. The boundaries of aether decay, the fabric of space-time unravels as the Enemy reaches a final condition, to compress our spacetime within their greater congruence, one where no life nor logic is possible. Past and future slip with greater ease into each other; doors long shut are opened; cause and effect becomes dreamlike. In earlier ages, paradox would have stopped me. Not now. The end of all things is nigh: even subatomic interactions lose coherence.”

“We were promised that there would be a light beyond this darkness, a time when all true lovers would be reunited!”

“That report is known to us as well, but when we send a Foreteller to walk the fourth dimension of time, from that direction comes nothing but a dreadful silence, and those who turn their thoughts toward it are lost and do not return. There is nothing after the end of man.”

“How will Man end?”

He said, “The prophecies you know are roughly true. The Great Southern Watching thing over the next fifty thousand years will continue forward, half an inch a year, extinguish the Electric Circle, shatter the Air-Clog to allow the influences of the Night into our windows. The Lanterns of Darkness of the Seven Towers to the West will be lit, and their beams will fall across the Western face of the Last Redoubt. A single blow from the Paw of the Thing will rend the gate and the surrounding walls, and nine great spirits of uttermost darkness from the dead stars beyond Arcturus will descend, escorted by the Lifeless Tree, and enter into the empty cities of our ground level, and take possession. Year by year they will climb the stairs, overcoming every barrier and ward and emplacement the ever-dwindling race of man shall erect against them. Those trapped in the upper citadel of the Redoubt and those trapped below in the buried gardens will diverge into two distinct human species. The boundaries of aether will diminish further; dreams will walk the balconies of the shattered citadel, solid beneath the failing lamps. The cisterns will grow dry, and men will gnaw their tongues for thirst. The ghosts of past ages will grow ever thicker, and the number of the living diminish, and the loss of memory which protects the current generation will fail. Every man will be possessed as I am possessed, but by many legions, not my one. The Last Child will be born, the most perfect of beings, who will attempt to open the Doors of Time and allow us to escape into the past: and even though the effort is doomed to fail, he must attempt it, and must fail. The Hounds of Tindalos who enter through the angles of Time will enter, and the laws of geometry will become non-Euclidean; the laws of morality become no longer suited to our condition of being. The final tribe of men will do all fashion of corruption and abomination to their children's minds and bodies, thinking it wise and right. The Thing Which Laughs will come forth from the Country of the Great Laughter, and his visage will blind ten thousand, who will go forth dancing and rejoicing and enter the dim and ever-gaping Doors of the House of Silence. The Night-Hounds will learn the Master Word and enter the upper citadel, and slay the Last Child. The Silent Ones will doff their robes and be seen in their true shape, and will enter the Tower of the Monstruwacans to dwell there, and extinguish all the lamps there, and shatter the Great Glass. The greater servants of darkness will feast on the lesser ones, and all the abhumans be slain and consumed by monstrosities, and these in turn will be drained by their dark masters.

“Know that the technology to preserve and revive ghosts, that magnetic echo of human life where our interior self is carried, will be perfected by this time, and even the death of all men will not destroy the preservation crystals where the psychic force of centuries is kept. For five hundred thousand years after the last death in the flesh of mankind, the surface of the Great Redoubt will retain some part of the charge of the etheric force that sustains life, and all the ghosts of the slain will remain in suspension here, walking the corridors, unaware that they are dead. Then a great voice will come from the House of Silence, and speak that word which is the opposite of the Master-Word, and the ghosts of the lordly dead will enter a condition of being utterly unlike and infinitely worse than if they had merely been annihilated.”

I was speechless with dread for a full minute, oppressed by the vision of destruction.

“These things must come to pass?”

“Soon or late. Because I speak, I hope to add thousands of years, not centuries, to the lifespan of mankind, and delay this death by an aeon.”

My next words crackled with anger, “And are all your people slain by your act? All your ancestors back through countless years?”

He was solemn. His eyes seemed not to see me. “Every man and woman and child ever born across the fifty thousand years of aborted time has been consulted, directly or by proxy, and all consent. Our race is weaker than your own, lesser in number by an order of magnitude, and yet we are not so weak as ancient men once were. No one lives in this pyramid, the mighty home of Man, who does not stand ready to sacrifice himself that others may live, or to slay their loved ones, that others may die wholesome deaths, and escape destruction.”

“What is this terrible message from the future?” I asked him, and once again the awe and fear of the Mind Song was upon me. The machines in the base of the pyramid, six miles or more below my feet, throbbed and beat through the air silently, and I detected their action with my brain elements. In their swift and automatic fashion, they had linked the minds of the many souls in the pyramid together, waking and sleeping alike, men and women, and determined what emotion was right and sane for me to feel. Nothing but terror and awe was fitting, to hear a race of man, a span of eternity, condemned.

“The message has already been spoken," he said. “The clue that it is possible is enough. Only in your heart is love enough, a son's love for his lost father, to pull you from the safe serenity of this last living fortress, and down into the darkness, death, and silence of the Night Land.”

111.

And I heard the great sigh, both in my mind, and with my ears, coming from the million windows of our nearly empty pyramid.

The collected minds of all the human race could grasp in an instant what would have taken an equal number of men scattered over generations centuries to see. The machinery needed to capture the essential substance of the dead was not, after all, so different from the Air-Clog that surrounded the Last Redoubt, and kept the thought-forms of the Abhorrent Ones at bay. The engineers, philosophers, spiritualists and pnuematicists from many scattered cells and chambers in the great pyramid had combined their genius with the racial mind, and sketched out a rough design. The instrument would be no larger than a lantern: a man could hold it in one hand, and the housing made of aetherically-neutral metal, to dampen out thought-vibrations. A ghost-cell.

“My father is dead!” I shouted at him. I was too astonished to notice that the Mind Song selected anger, an emotion so old that only one of my order could know of it. “He fell in the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill! There has been no whisper of mind speech from him these many years! No one can survive so long in the outer darkness!”

But the future man, now of an extinguished race, was gone. The Mind Song in him was no longer that of the Eighteenth Men. He straightened; his eyes met mine; and it was Heliogabalus again, and his thoughts were shared with my thoughts, peaceful, sane, endlessly calm.

112.

The anger was gone in a moment, and for many weeks I wondered why the machines in their wisdom had selected that particular emotion for that time: joy and hope was what should have been in my heart. I love my father, and would do anything, even venture into the Outer Darkness, to recover him. The hint that his immaterial essence, his mind and thoughts and inner self might still be in existence, uncorrupted, not suffering Destruction was hope beyond hope: as if, long after the coffin was sealed and the tomb was shut, a voice came to tell you to open it again. Why had I not felt gratitude?

113.

The Preparation for the Going Out has not changed since four million years ago: the ways of the Forces and Powers are made known, oaths taken, information too delicate to be known to the foe removed from the brain. There is a time of fasting, and an exposure to concentrations of the Earth Current and other salvific rays and radiations. Then a last meal, consisting of certain fruits, otherwise long extinct, kept in cultivation just for this ceremony, and never eaten at any other time. The capsule is implanted, and the other ways of swift self-destruction taught, in case the capsule, for whatever reason, should fail. Final warnings and admonitions are laid upon the soul of the Adventurer by the Captain of the Gate. Final memories and testaments are imprinted by means of the brain-elements into a book of activated metal leaves.

Only those may go who are young men, unmarried, unapprenticed, unindebted, unindentured. Orphans, or those with no living brothers to carry on their family names and gene patterns may not go, for the eugenicists will not permit a culling of our boldest over centuries, lest we breed ourselves into cowardliness. Neither the old, nor the sickly may venture forth, nor, during those aeons when insanity and crime existed, could a man go unless a jury of his neighbors bound themselves by twelve oaths that he was hale and of sound mind and good character. No man who had taken orders from the Monstruwacans could go, nor who served the Architects, nor a man who had suffered neuro-alteration, or who possessed an augmented soul; nor could pass out from our gates any dreamer who dreamed of strange things unknown to other men, if he could not account to the oneiropaths of the origin of each dream; and no woman, ever.

There are some tools, like the hand-axe or the hull of a ship, which, having achieved a most graceful shape, need no further change. The harness and gear of the Out-Venture has not changed in all the ages since the time of the Seventh Race of Men: above a long vest of padding, I wore armor made of the same imperishable metal as the Last Redoubt; my helm was gray as well, without plume or device. A dun mantle of living fibers covered my shoulders, able to generate heat against the piercing chill of the Night Land, and to comfort the soul. In my script I carried a dirk of energized metal, a dial that could be read by touch, and a needle that pointed toward the geomagnetic aura of the Great Redoubt. Here also were tablets of nutriment, and the powder whose virtue was to condense water out of the air: no spring in the Night Land could be trusted, either because of soil contamination, or strange lights, or haunting. A cup could purify the water, and also be held over the mouth and nose when passing through thin air or clouds of venom or fine particles.

The Diskos is the perfect weapon. It is as if alive, and charged with Earth-Current, and the blade is a sharpened circle of massy weight which gives off a terrible light and dread low roaring when it spins. And when it is quiet, it is tense with a terrible quiet, so that to touch the still blade with a finger is to feel its hidden energy tingling. The blade is held on forks. The shaft of the weapon is cunningly made, so that the hand of the man who owns it can make the shaft grow longer or shorter, so that the head of the weapon is closer or farther, depending on the size of the monster to be smitten, and the length of the needed stroke. The charge in the weapon can electrocute even insubstantial attackers, or purge bad air. Legend says the Hog was slain by a stroke of the first of these weapons made by Carnacki the Artificer.

We carry no lamp nor candle in the Night Land, for the temptation caused by light-hunger would be too great, and watchful things would be drawn to any glimmer of wholesome radiance. The Diskos gives off a flare of white fire when we smite, and its fearsome shining extends as far as the weapon-stroke reach, and lasts for the duration of the stroke, no longer.

If a monster stands too far off to be pole-axed with our weapon, it is better not to see them, but to let them pass by, unmolested.

Neither is it hale to peer too narrowly or overlong at any creatures above the human range of life force, lest they bring nightmares, and nightmares attract the hungers of the Pneumovores as blood in the sea, back when seas still lived, attracted the shark packs who ruled those waters then. It is better to walk blind in the darkness, and see only what the Night Hearing shows.

114.

When I stepped out into the bitter chill of the Night Land, the gate slid silently and swiftly shut behind me. The gateway was dark, and all the masters of the Watch, the squires and custodians of the gate-house, had been present, standing on the great slope of the downward stairs in their gray armor of imperishable metal. Each one held his Diskos, but the disks were still, and the weapons were not lit, so that even the tiny hum and spark of those weapons would not escape into the Night Land and tell that some child of man crept forth.

I passed out from the North-West gate. A signal went from corridor to corridor through the great pyramid, so that, as I crept forth, a sudden great commotion was heard to the South-Eastern side of the Pyramid. I heard it dimly, and it sounded like the roar of the hidden sea that can be sometimes heard in the great pipes below the pyramid, from whence we take our water. This was meant to distract the watchers of the night world; for armigers and fulgurators were firing rockets and culverins from the low balconies (say, perhaps only half a mile above the land) across the gray dunes and down into the deep pits of the Country of Wailing.

Even from across so wide a distance, miles away from us and around the far side of the mighty pyramid, I heard the whooping, deep, low sounds of the Wail, and I could feel it tremble in my teeth, as if a great hill or mountain were to utter its grisly lament. A great Voice uttered from the Mountain of the Voice, and it was answered by the terrifying mirth that issued from unseen mouths in the Country Whence Comes the Great Laughter. And not long after, I heard the terrible baying of the Night-Hounds, but I thought they were issuing south, toward the commotion. Soon also came the wind-roaring from the underground warrens of the Giants whose kilns lie somewhat to the south and east. This clamor showed that they had lifted their great doors, for the sounds of their air-machinery can be clearly heard when their iron doors gape open, and the Giants rage forth across the pits and craters of the Night Land, thick as ants from an antish fort of dirt.

I moved quietly, and left the prints of my metal boots in the soft sand and ash that was gathered all around the foot of the pyramid. These ashes were alleged to be the remnants of great beasts and beings that had been destroyed, ninety-one hundred years ago, blasted by a flood of the energies of the Earth-Current down the armored sides of the pyramid, a flood so great that the mighty home was said to be darkened for three hours or more, and all the lamps were drained.

When I came to the Circle, it was a tube of transparent metal held perhaps nine inches from the soil. It was small enough that I could step over it in one step; and yet, on this small light, the life of all the hundred thousand who lived in the Pyramid depended. Without it, the thoughts of the Darkness would have reached from the House of Silence, or the Quiet City, the Dark Palace, or other places of power, past all our walls and gates and doors, into the hearts and dreams of our children, there to grow and swell until we were no longer human, and our souls be made fit for the Enemy to consume. Such small and frail things defend us.

The clamor of the barrage meant to cover my departure was still going on when I passed over the Circle.

Then the thought of mankind was gone. Instead I felt in my brain the silent watchfulness of the Night Lands, pulsations inhuman and remote from earthly life like the pressure of a coming storm against the metal fabric of my helmet.

I was alone. For the first time since birth, since before birth (for prenatal empathies are drawn into the Mind Weaving as well) I was all alone.

115.

All the old passions and fears of a dawn-age man were pounding in my thoughts: fear and giddiness and terror and self-will; lust and anger and sloth and a dozen extravagances. I had been trained and Prepared, but this was an intoxication I could not fathom. I went from being pure to being a beast man in one step.

No one else could have endured it. I was a retromancer of ancient recollection. In me dwelt a dozen lives or more of heroes from our past, all their passions and their memories. Like the call of a trumpet to arms, those ancient visions stirred within my breast. My fear was transformed to cool fury, my sudden passions into passionate calm tension, an eagerness to go and do great deeds.

We are not mere thinkers and savants, we men of the Seventeenth Race. Our perfection is not a trap to weaken our resolve. The blood of heroes still was in me, and all the imperfections needed to stir that blood to anger and devotion. Nothing other than being human will allow a man to stand in the silence of the Night, and not be extinguished.

I thought of my father, and my love for him gave life to my limbs. Conquering fear, I stepped away.

116.

Scholars spend lifetimes classifying the genus and species of the horrors scratching at our windows and gates. Some are like us, occupying three dimensions of space and one of time, have blood and bones and brain. Apish abhumans, as well as taller giants, many-armed abominations, wide-mouthed ghouls and mantachores who once had upright stance: these are the least of our foes. Samples of their blood and brain matter show that their ancestors once may have been human, but they adapted to the endless dark, were mutated by the spiritual influences of those great Powers that walk in the Night, or were changed by energies released over aeons by gaps, pits and fissures in the crust of the dead earth, or by poisons they released themselves with the machines we hear pounding, forever pounding, in the warrens and sunken places of the siege against us.

Whether the Enemy builded the mile-high towers to the West, or whether it was the ancestral races of man whom scholars say dwelt outside the Last Redoubt in legendary times, no one knows.

The Silent Ones have never been known to slay a human being who did not first trouble them, or trespass into the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill. For this reason, there are some who claim they are no part of the Host of the Night, no more than the lampreys that cling to the bellies of sharks are sharks.

Others say that they are indeed the leaders and archons of the great siege against us, and that they do not deign to kill merely out of their delicacy. The books of the future have been examined by the Monstruwacans, and this is one of the pieces of information known to be on the Interdicted List: this means it is some knowledge visions have confirmed that no future generation of mankind will ever discover. It is held not lawful to inquire into the matter, since the line of inquiry is already foreknown to be unprofitable, and the time the human race has left to answer all the questions of the human condition is limited. We shall never know.

117.

The river of mud had dug itself a deep canyon all around, and, subsiding over centuries, had left behind many lesser valleys, swales, and scars, a land of mud-pits and swampy ox-bows, all embraced between two steep walls cut and rutted with the erosion of dead centuries past. It was two weary hours of scrambling up and down crumbling slopes and splashing across puddles of frozen or of boiling mud, before I reached those steep and rotten canyon walls; and another five hours of fruitless attempts and many falls before I found a crooked switchback leading up past chipped and pockmarked walls of mud-covered stone to the surface of the world again.

As I emerged from the canyon, I came once more into the sight of our mighty home. There it loomed, a pyramid of human life, mile on mile rising in the distance, balcony upon balcony and embrasure upon embrasure. The difference in texture of the surface armor, as where lines of fortresses or roofed townships had been erected along the dormers, all this was erased into smoothness because of the distance.

The arched windows of the Sunderhouse men, the long and narrow window-slits of the Patrones, all these architectural curios which figure so prominently in our history and public debates, from here, were invisible. Even the acre-wide aerodrome bays, long lost and long forgotten, a remnant from an earlier aeon when the air of the outer world was different, even these were so tiny as to be invisible discolorations in the rank on rank of blazing light.

Craning my head back, I could glimpse a spark of light, brighter than most, at the apex of the converging lines of the pyramid, vanishing in the distance overhead. Of the Utmost Tower itself, or the sanctuary of the Monstruwacans, I could see nothing. Those high and distant cities which sit on the uppermost stories of the pyramid, just under the armor of the penthouse, names famed in our romances and literature: Aeloia where Scarapant once climbed to wed his lost Angelica, Golden Aeyre, made famous by the poet Erebophoebus, and Highguard West in whose greenhouses the beloved last pines grow, which will not grow in the deep farms and fields buried beneath our pyramid, none of these were even visible at all; but a tiny mote I thought perhaps was the ninety-fathom tall Major Pumphouse by the shore of the roofed-in Attic Lake glinted in my eye, the rumored fountainhead of the Hundred-Story Waterfall, designed by the Architect Ellivro.

118.

I will not detail the times of my marching. Many watches passed as I stalked in the night, and when the dial told me to rest, I rested, with my spirit alert about me to wake me lest some dread and deathly Power come nigh. I ate of the tablets of the scrip, and grew lean and clear-minded, for they feed only the soul, not the flesh.

The first creature I slew was a giant who came suddenly out of a sandy place near a smoke-hole, and the moss bushes deadened the noise of his approach.

He meant to dash my brains out with a cudgel, but I avoided the blow, and cut a great gash in his side with the stroke of my Diskos, penetrating hide and blubber, and the lighting stabbed through his body. He wept as he lay dying, and his sobs sounded almost human. I struck again, meaning to decapitate, but the blow landed clumsily, biting into his massive shoulder-plate and collarbone. Nonetheless, this second blow snapped his neck, and a surge of power from the hilts of my weapon blackened the face and head of the man-creature, killing him. He was nigh twice my height: his wrist was thicker than my thigh.

That first encounter was more danger than the next six or seven I slew, for by then I was grown wary and cunning. The long weeks beneath the pulsing mental pressure of the Night Lands, the hooting voices, the strange distant lights making omens to each other, the grisly viciousness of the mutated beasts, the loathsome things that crawled like slugs, all awoke in me a deadly warlike nature that surely my oldest ancestors, from the pyramid's earliest times, must have known.

I spend more miles crawling than I did walking; I avoided far more than I slew, and I covered my tracks after. Only when I could not avoid it, as when I was in a blind canyon, or had to pass a guarded spot, did I encounter the night creatures. I smote at monsters from behind, or when they slept, or when they went to the bubbling pools of black water to sip the salty liquid.

119.

As I passed through the diseased land of the abhumans, crawling from ditch to ditch, and hiding in the ash of cold crater-mouths, I saw the race destined to replace us, walking on their back paws with large steps across a land the dark powers had given them: stoop-shouldered, crooked-legged men with powerful chests, arms as thick as my leg. Their nails were black like iron, and their hairy pelts were thick and coarse, like the pelts of shaggy wolves from a former age; their mouths were like the muzzles of baboons, with canines keener than my dirk. They had no tool more complex than the thighbone of a Night-Hound that they used for truncheons; and their dams and their spratlings were equally unlovely.

But it was not their crudeness that repelled me; it was the wisdom in their eyes, their wolf-eyes glowing green beneath thick brow ridges. I saw in their expressions a cruelty, a haunting and solemn cruelty, humans are not prone to know.

These things thought more like men than the Night-Hounds, the giants, or the behemoths, and they were cunning to guess my ways. And so they grew aware of me, and hunted me.

With the abhumans on my trail, I was driven east, back toward the Pit of Red Smoke. I entered the rocky and broken terrain surrounding the lip of the Deep Valley which encloses the Pit, a land of cliff and standing stones. The land here was tormented, as if giants with axes had split the ground and flung huge boulders every way (though our records show no trace that the giants had ever done such a thing, here); and often I came across rows of pillars and the rubble where walls had been.

Over several watches the abhumans hunted me, and I needed to rely upon my memory of the maps I had studied in the House of the Monstruwacans of this bit of terrain, so that a retreat down some promising canyon would not turn into a cul-de-sac, and death.

When the Pit of Red Smoke was belching opaque clouds, and the land was dark, I moved; when the Pit was calm, and red shine hung on the bellies of low clouds, and red shadows fell across the stark rocks of the land, I hid.

At such times, I could see the Last Redoubt, shining and beautiful in the distance. But, nearer at hand, I saw the Lesser Dome of Too Many Doors, windowless and crusted with pentagonal cracks as if it had been the shell of a monstrous tortoise.

And, also I saw, to one side and beyond it, the lowering profile of the Northwest Watching Thing. This was the oldest and most cunning of the Watching Things, and it was several miles closer to the Redoubt than it had been in our ancestors’ times. For perhaps half a million years, the Thing had lifted its mighty arm, crusted with moss and debris, and held it aloft to point toward the pyramid, hand supine, its spread fingers longer than tree boles. A lake had slowly gathered from the atmospheric moisture in the hollow of its great dark palm, and the heat from its body prevented the lake from turning to ice. None knew what the gesture presaged, but it filled all who beheld it with dread.

Once, two hundred years ago, a discharge of ground-lighting had ignited near the Northwest Watching Thing, and in that flare a Monstruwacan named Semelus had seen the smile slowly spreading across its mask-parts, observed the glitter of its strange eyes, and the sight of it had sickened him, so that he bit the capsule and died before his soul was wounded beyond recovery.

As I stood observing the terrible silhouette of the Northwest Watching Thing, it must have felt the pressure of my gaze, for I sensed a pulse of hideous thought cross the darkness of the air. It was like a horn-call, but utterly silent. Immediately I heard stealthy noises in the dark to one side of me; I fled the other way, as quickly as stealth allowed, and, in the dark, climbed a cliff, with nothing to guide me but touch to find the hand-holds and toe-holds across the icy rock. I had to draw off my gauntlets to do it, because the fingers of the gauntlet were too clumsy for this work, but the stone soon sucked all the heat and feeling out of my fingers; with numb hands, I could not feel where the stone was, and, in the dark, the rocky cliff seemed to no longer be vertical.

I heard sniffing noises underfoot, and caught the odor of abhumans thick in the air.

All at once, blinding me, a flare from the Pit of Red Smoke rose up, and I could see the cliff; I was but a little yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks. The light was splashing against the height where I was, but the canyon I had just crawled from was black to my eyes, though I heard a low sardonic mutter of abhumans speaking to each other when I became visible. For some reason, it chilled me to hear them, so calm, so self-controlled, when they spotted me; I did not know what words they said, but their tones were dry and sardonic.

When I crested the brink, I heard a low, mocking laugh coming from my left. Here, out from the shadow of a tall rock, and into the leaping red light, came three hunched figures. Apelike, they moved on feet and knuckles, carrying their truncheons in their teeth, but they each rose to their back feet when they rushed toward me, grasping their truncheons in one or both forepaws; and they smiled grimly as they came. The stench from their powerful arms was terrible.

I drew the Diskos, and felt the power in the haft enter my hands and warm them; the flare of light, the terrible roar of the spinning blade, caused the foremost abhuman to hesitate; I slashed him across the belly, and lighting threw his guts unwinding from the ghastly wound; and his body jumped a yard into the air from the electric shock, arms and legs jerking; the other two closed in on either side of me, and aimed truncheon-blows at my legs and head.

One blow struck my leg armor, which rang like a bell; and I fell, so the other blow passed my helmet, and struck the rock to one side of me with such force, the rock splintered and flew in pieces. By this mere mischance was my life saved.

At that same moment in time, the flare from the Red Pit ended, and black smoke smothered all the light. The Diskos, either by fate, or because of its own wiliness, ceased to spin and roar, so the blade went out; and the hulking mass of the abhuman I felt move near above me became invisible in the sudden dark.

Awkwardly I rolled to one side. Something in my motion startled the abhuman stooping over me. I heard his truncheon whistle through the air, I felt rock-splinters from his superhuman blow thrown, tinkling, against my armor. I struck upward with the shaft of my Diskos. There was no flare, no noise, since I struck with the insulated part of the haft, but I must have struck the soft parts of his lower belly, for he lost his footing in the dark. There was a slither of pebbles, and rush of air, and, with a low, sarcastic mutter like a curse, I heard the great beast-man fall. He must have pitched off the brink in the dark; for I heard the sound of his body passing through the air below. There were hisses from down below in the canyon, low words suggestive of irony and contempt, and perhaps a scoffing laugh or two, when the body fell among those gathered there.

I rose to my feet and lit my weapon, and the blade uttered its roar. Now there was no light from the red pit; the only light here was the flare from my blade. The remaining beast-man straightened up, and with a gesture of distaste, put one paw before his wolfish eyes in the sudden glare and stepped slowly back.

He hefted his club and measured the distance between us with his eyes. He saw that he had reach, and a more powerful blow than I did, and yet he was wary, for the mere touch of my weapon was death, for the spinning blade flashed and roared with frightful living energies, nigh impossible to parry. The creatures unseen in the darkness below and behind me must have been able to see the combat, for we were nigh the edge: and I heard hisses and grunts as they called out in their language smirking advice, sardonic japes and deprecations to their unbeloved comrade. From his eyes I could see he was not comforted by their calls.

At that same moment, I felt in my soul a profound chill, and I knew it was some force from the House of Silence breathing courage and inhuman intelligence into this degenerate beast-man. He picked up one of the fallen truncheons in his second forepaw, so that he held two: I saw he meant merely to feint with one and smite with the other; no matter which way I turned, he would surely smite from the other way, and have me. I am not a small man, nor a weak one, but I was as a child before this apelike mass of brawn and cunning.

He stepped hugely forward, and my spirit shrank within me, and his spirit grew like a terrible and hungry shadow.

At that moment, I heard a murmur like the roar of the sea. To my left, miles away, the Last Redoubt was visible, balcony upon balcony shining, a wall of light. People had been watching my duel. When I had first lit my weapon and struck at the first abhuman, surely men, women, and children standing in the pyramid windows, or over their telescopes, must have cried out. Perhaps only a gasp, of a word of hope, but, amplified by a million voices, it became a strong noise on the wind of the world; only now had that cry reached me.

How that sound filled my heart! I saw doubt twist the sneering muzzle of the abhuman; his eyes (for at that moment, seeming almost human) were troubled with sorrow and regret.

While he paused, I snapped my Diskos-shaft out to its polearm length, and performed a running lunge called a flèche; the monster raised his heavy bone club to parry, but it is no easy matter to parry a spinning disk; my blade skipped off and around his parry and smote his wrist. With the second club he swung a round wide blow toward my head, but I lifted my trailing hand high, to catch the truncheon on the ringing shaft of my weapon, a foot above my helm; and sparks flew up. Of its own, the shaft extended and drove the spinning blade down along his arm and into the armpit of my foe.

It would have been a minor wound, for his body was very great, had my weapon been a minor weapon, for the cut itself was not deep; but the power and shock of the Earth-Current shining from my blade entered his wound and made his limbs jerk and jump. Before he could recover, I stepped under his reach, left only my swordhand to guide the Diskos to continue eating into his side on its own. I heard the whine as the spinning blade cut through bone, and the blood sprayed backward in a fan, and the blade-heat lit the coarse hairs of his arm afire. Meanwhile I drew my dirk with my off hand, and struck into his great hairy chest at the spot where my trainers told me the heart might be.

There was no heart, but I saw, beneath the bubbling gush of blood and puddings, a cold black orb of shining black stone. I knew not what this was: it was some artifice of the enemy, something his masters had put in him. Even so, the abhuman, though he was torn open in the chest, wounded in the wrist, arm, and armpit, I saw the unclean spirit enter his eyes once more. It dropped the two clubs and grappled with me. Such was his strength that even armor as stern as mine creaked and complained; I could not breathe, and my ribs were bending.

The Diskos, as if of its own accord, shortened on its haft, so that it was the size of a short ax rather than a pole-arm, and I threw my elbow over his huge shoulder as if to embrace my foe. The Diskos flew like a pendulum and fell against the small of the creature's hairy back. I severed his spine, even as he nearly broke mine. The low roar of my weapon became shrill noise of triumph as the spinning blade sawed through hide and muscle, vertebrae and nerve-trunk. The louder and more distant roar from the thousand cities of mankind, echoing from the distant balconies miles above me and miles away, told me the blow that I could not see had struck home, and that victory was mine.

The monster fell down with me still pinned in his arms.

Somehow, he was still alive. A weird vitality clung to its frame. The arms like iron pinioned me, and only my armor saved me. The face was pressed to mine, and he gnawed on the cheekplates of my helmet, trying to bite the flesh of my face. His canines were like daggers of bone, and adrip with warm slobber.

“Why do you hate us?” I whispered aloud, gasping. “Why do you attack us?”

The abhuman grinned at that, and his eyes glinted like black stones, and his beast mask was transformed as the abhuman died, and the possessing force came fully to the fore: it was no longer a him, but an it.

Now the face of it was something wholly opposite a man, something antithetical to all life.

“Malice is its own reason," The words from the mouth were in an ancient language. “Malice invents its own excuses. The Great Ones could have smashed your flimsy metal house long and long ago, child of man, but it is degradation they crave: death is too noble. For centuries they will torment your dead, until even your memories are a torment. I am made in mockery of you, me and all my race, a crooked copy, merely so that you can be told this final secret: there is nothing.”

“What have we ever done? Did our ancestors open up a gate into an ulterior dimension and release this horror? What is the reason?”

It laughed without breath. “No reason. There is nothing. You are to die. You scream in the night. The silence will not answer you.”

By that time, I had worked a hand free, found again my dirk, and, straining, brought the point up to the soft flesh beneath its chin. Because my arm was pinned so tightly against its monster chest I could not push the dirk quickly, therefore I applied pressure until the point slowly penetrated its chin and tongue and mouth, the roof of its mouth and skull, and finally the blade found its brain, and the metal pulsed with light, radiance entered its brain pan, and it died fully and completely.

I had to saw myself free of the monster's grip with the spinning blade of my Diskos.

Then, my blade still, utter darkness fell over the scene again; and I crawled away from the combat, moving on three limbs like an abhuman, one hand on the ground. My other hand held my Diskos, and I used it like an old man’s staff to support my steps.

What was it? The noise of many voices from the Last Redoubt was gone. It was as if all mankind held its breath. There was some danger near me, something the Monstruwacans did not dare to signal to me through the flashing lamps of the upper stories, lest their signal make my foes rush in.

I listened. Slithering noises of pebbles dropping was the only warning I had that the company of abhumans were scaling the cliffs behind me. Perhaps they were already here.

As silently as a man in armor can move, I fled.

120.

Nine hours later I finally escaped pursuit by immersing myself in a stream of sulfurous water. The chemicals in the boiling river made the abhumans lose the scent. A great cloaked Walker five hundred feet high passed through the area, and the abhumans fled before it, loping away, snarling. The Walking Thing passed away south on long crooked legs, its shrouds and tatters like a black mist, billowing, and it dwindled and I lost sight of it.

I found my father's body lying just where it had fallen so many years ago. The body rested among a cluster of jagged stones. To one side shined the ghastly unwinking light from the Plain of Blue Fire. From the North, along the Black Hilltops, gleamed the Seven Lights, pale as death. Each standing stone had a double shadow of gray-white and dark blue, making a confusion of shadows. There were nests of stinging ants larger than a man's hand creeping on black legs in and out of the cracks between the rocks. Strangely enough, these were actually ants, a form of life with earthly ancestry, and so when I touched them with my spirit and spoke the Master Word, they were awed, and scuttled away from me. No doubt a nest had escaped through a broken window at some point in the near past, and the colony had not remained long enough exposed to the malice of the Night Lands to be changed by the thought-forms of the House of Silence. I took it as a good omen.

From afar, I could see how Night-Hounds had torn at the face and hands, but his armor had protected the rest of him from despoliation. The electric tingle in the air, the smell of ozone, told me his Diskos was still alert, even though, in the gloom, I did not see it. The clean aura of the weapon would have discouraged any of the lesser creatures from approaching.

Even my approach was wary, for as I came near my father's Diskos I felt my own weapon stirring oddly in my grasp, due to magnetic sympathy. I felt the buildup of electrical tension in the air, but I said the Master-Word with my brain-elements, and my father's weapon quieted.

I felt a stirring in the black heavens above me, and I quailed, expecting death; and I put my lips near the flesh of my forearm where the capsule was embedded, that I might quickly bite and die before I was destroyed—but then I saw a thin white line, made of a light more pure and silvery in hue than any lamp. I thought it must be from a higher spectrum than what exists in this continuum: there was a sense of peace to it. Where the line ended, I can not say. It seemed at first to be dropping down from the cloud overhead, as slender as a spider thread: but then as my eyes adjusted, I saw it came from a direction that was neither up nor down, nor any direction the three dimensional mind can perceive.

For as many years as the horrors have thronged around the Last Redoubt, through all the silent weight of numberless millennia, every now and again, oddly, inexplicably, one man or another who walked in the darkness of the Night Land would see a strange manifestation of something that seems to wish human beings well, not ill: but how it is that any of these ulterior ones could be aware of us, or why they would show us favor, I cannot say. No message has ever come from them: their constituent energies cannot be reduced to impulses falling within the normal psychometric ranges. In olden days, boys flung overboard at sea, back when the seas of the world still existed, would from time to time be rescued by living animals called dolphins. Even though no words were ever spoken with these swimming beings, extinct so long ago, yet they were not myth. The Good Powers were as those beings to us: a matter of tales and wonder. I had never thought to see one.

It touched me, and I knew this was one of that kind whose authority is over time and preservation from decay. It was as delicate on my face as a spring wind that once existed in the open world in the ancient days of light.

I looked, and saw where the slender silver line reached, and lo, here was my father's Diskos lying in a narrow place between two rock-splinters, deeply so that I would not otherwise have seen it. When I moved my eyes to follow the light-path, it was gone, and by this I understood that it was a ray extended through a fractal geometry of space, so that even creatures a pace away could not have seen it. It was meant for me, and for me alone.

When the light vanished, I saw my father's corpse was gone, and only empty armor, scraps of rotted lining, showing where the body had been. Where the corpse went, or how I saw it so clearly, that I do not know.

Nothing of earth, nothing of the condition of timespace as we know it, could have saved my father's soul for years untouched and uncorrupt in the middle of the dark silence of the Night Land.

I could not reach the Diskos with my arm, and I was afraid to remove my armor and reach with a bare arm: but I touched my Diskos blade to it, and the magnetism made the two cling together. Once and twice and thrice I attempted to draw the weapon from the narrow place, and each time it scraped against the side and fell back. Patiently I reached again and again, but I could not draw it up.

Then I laughed at myself, dismounted the heavy round blade of my Diskos and laid it carefully on the cold rocky soil to one side. Now I held a wand that throbbed with living metal, ending with two forks. I took out the ghost-cell, and looped its lanyard over the forks of my Diskos, and the Earth-Current in the weapon made it cling. I opened the stop-cock, and activated the etheric cell inside the little housing. I lowered the ghost-cell with its stop open on the end of my weapon forks, and gently I touched it to the Diskos.

In no wise did the weapon smite me, but instead, as if it were a living thing, and gentle of soul, it passed into the ghost-cell that which the white multidimensional line had for so long preserved within the spiritual circuitry of that weapon. I saw the charge needle on the ghost-cell swing over, and the measurement was within the norm for a human male of middle years.

The cell was no bigger than a lantern: I held it in one hand, near my eye. Before I even spoke, I heard the voice of my beloved father come to me from the cylinder, and even as I paused in wonder, I heard with my brain elements the Master-Word beating, low and solemn through the aether, coming from what I cradled in my fingers.

“You are he," I said, “Not some lying voice from the darkness, meant to snare, but my own father, whom I love.”

But he would not answer me until I sent back the Master-Word, and showed him I was human.

The week or more that passed as we two traveled back toward the great redoubt were filled with great joy and also great terror. Once the Severed Hemisphere descended from the clouds, and passed overheard and I was sure our doom had come. Ready to slay even my own father, I raised the forks of my weapon and readied with one hand the stroke to drive the blades into the delicate housing of the ghost-cylinder. My other hand was at my mouth, of course, so that I could bite the capsule and perish.

For perhaps a watch the Hemisphere stood above us. I could not see it with my eye, but by the troubling of my spirit I knew it. And yet the Hemisphere passed by and did us no hurt. Silent as mist, it went from us, traveling toward the Quiet City by the shore of the Giant's Ocean: and I cannot account for this, because I was clearly within the primary radius of action of the Hemisphere. And yet perhaps it was bent on some horrid business at the Quiet City: for many of the strange unwinking lights of that place fell into the water and were extinguished, and did not rise again: whether the things in the night prey on each other is not well established. Certainly the hounds and giants, which are made of flesh, have no hesitation to turn on each other: but the evil creatures from so far above us in the scale of cosmic evolution, from zones of the universe far older than the visible universe, we cannot determine their actions.

And then the noise of a trumpet blowing came from the Western Hills where the Three Listening Granoliths rise dark and empty—and this sign is ever one that precedes some great change in the Night Lands. It was one heard in the years before the Great South Watcher approached from the south, and, two million years later, it was last heard sounding before the coming of the Thing That Nods. The Thing rose out of the shadows of the South East, beyond the Place of the Windowless Object, so that the Object was hidden from the sight of man from that time to this.

I spoke to the soul I cradled in my hand. “Father, one of the Great Powers has passed us by, and done us no hurt—and my heart misgives me.”

I heard his voice with my brain-elements. “Aeneas, use now the learning that I taught to you, and realize that it is for no good purpose that we were spared. The Force and Influences issuing from the House of Silence are cunning, but their cunning is not as a man's cunning, for they are not as we are.”

“Do you mean me to kill you?” I asked in astonishment, forgetting myself, and speaking aloud. The sound of my voice echoed strangely in the gloom, and I feared I had brought a Night-Hound onto my trail, and so for many hours I did not speak again, but crept from crevasse to crevasse, parallel to the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk.

After I rested and slept and woke, we spoke once more: "Why do you think harm will come if I bring you into the Great Redoubt, O Serapis?”

“Are you obedient to me, my son?”

I was not sure how to answer. “Father, all I have done, I have done for you, that I might be as you once dreamed I would be, that you would look on me in pride. And yet how do I know your fears have not overthrown your reason?” For I had examined his thought-architecture with my Night-Hearing–at least, as well as I could without a soul-glass to catch supermundane reflections. His memories were mostly intact, but it was as if his mind lacked both hypothalamus and hippocampus. And he was alone, terribly alone, as I now was, with his weaknesses unsupported by the wisdom of the Great Thinking Machines, his thoughts un-uplifted by the love of the hundred thousands in the Last Redoubt. The harmony of the Mind Song was absent.

His thought touched mine: "It was to prevent the future from which he came that the Chronomancer came into the past and possessed great Heliogabalus. What is the one piece of craft known to them, unknown to us? What is the thing his word brought about?”

“The ghost-cell. His world was one where it did not exist until later years invented it. This time line is one where a greater measure of knowledge of the ghosts and their ways will be established unto men.”

“Ah, so it would seem, my son. And yet what does logic tell you? All those years I spent with you crafting your deep neural structures according to the learning of the schoolmen surely were not a waste: when you emerged from the Egg of Glass, at the pinnacle of the meditative arts, you surpassed even your teachers, even me. Your mind was clear enough to reach backward through time to encompass the record of all life. Such a mind cannot be unable to see the logic of this simple puzzle.”

“You are saying that the Chronomancer sent me out into the darkness, not to prevail, but to fail? My mission is parricide?”

The notion was so horrible, so alien to the norms of sanity, I sent the Master-Word once more into his soul, to confirm that father had not gone mad during the hours while I slept.

He answered with the Word, but also asked softly: "What was in his account of the Death of Mankind which is not from any prophecy or report we have ever heard erenow, even from those who venture too close to the screaming that comes from the end of time?”

I said, “He said the ghosts of all the dead would linger in the Great Redoubt for years and centuries after the death in all their flesh of all the last generation.”

“And then what?”

I did not answer him. The Chronomancer foretold Destruction for all the memories of all the race. Everyone who was safely dead and beyond their reach, every hero brave enough to take the capsule between his teeth and slay himself quickly before the Destruction of his human essence, would no longer be preserved and safe. Even the dead would be tormented and corrupted, their souls consumed with exquisite malice thought by thought.

I asked, “Is there some other place the lordly dead might be preserved?”

“After the Earth Current fails? Do not be foolish. At one time, in the youth of our race, these matters were the stuff of dreams and riddles; there were men who knew nothing of the psychic sciences, or did not comprehend how every finer mental substance must have a material substrate. But for countless ages we have known the truth, and I can confirm the guesses of the necromancers, who have studied the cycles of reincarnation for many millions of years.”

“Confirm what, father?”

“Learn now the lore of the dead: even spirits must pass away. There is no life past the universal night.”

“But we have studied the art of reincarnation, and know its secrets!”

“My son, the mighty Earth Current has the power to restore, even after many tens of thousands or millions of years, those who die within its aura, if their love is pure. Such heroes can be imprinted into the gene-plasm of the unborn. But the might of the Earth Current must fail in time. Know that there were once aurenetic fields alike to this surrounding the husk of our dead sun, and, at one time, surrounding the core of our dead galaxy. But the enemy, star by star, has disturbed the natural balance of aetheric and magnetic fields in heaven: and likewise disturbed the aether all the way to the core of the earth, and leached away the virtue of the Earth Current which sustains our life on this darkened world. It is a slow process. In early eons, men could be reborn on other worlds, on Arcturus, where the great sun Branchspell sheds light not meant for human eyes, in hues unknown to us, jale and ulfire. Again, men were born beneath the Green Star in the constellation of the bull, or in the unique rosette of planets captured by the star Omos in the Globular Cluster NGC 7006 in Delpinus: but as the darkness grew, fewer and fewer pneumo-astromagnetic fields survived able to act as a medium between distances. Soon men were confined only to reincarnate within the magnetic aura of the Earth-Current, both here and at the undiscovered Third Redoubt occupying the opposite pole of the planet. When that Redoubt betrayed itself and created the abhumans, the cycle was broken, and for many millennia life has been using up a stored energy that can never be revived. Nothing is promised in this new technology, this science of preserving dead memories like mine, nothing save that we will outlive the healthy and living phase of mortal life, and dwell for a time as shadows, as echoes, as recordings, and all the sacrifice we made to deny the enemy shall be in vain.”

I said, “This is the future we have avoided! The Chronomancer's sacrifice was to prevent this same you decry.”

“No. He reached the only time when man was perfect enough to see the difficult choice, and yet primitive enough in impulse to know the right thing to do. You alone of all our race recall the first wellsprings of life. The heroes of forgotten years, those grim and iron-hearted men of stoic temper: they still live in you. You alone of the Seventeenth Humanity are bold enough to venture out of the Last Redoubt; they are too refined and perfected to know what must be done. Slay me, and tell the Last Redoubt that attempts to preserve the race beyond our allotted span will prove as unwise as ever a novice proved who hesitated to bite the Capsule, hoping some star of light would save him, and this hope snared him to his destruction, whence his soul-remnants do not escape forever. There are some things it is better to die than to endure: and this is truth for races as for single men.”

“How can we live utterly without hope?”

“Where is hope to be found? As men in coffins, so entrapped is all our race by remorseless entropy, and a little time remains until the air runs out. It may be an hour or a minute. What shall you do, what shall we all do, in the span of time remaining? Claw at the lid as beasts might do? There is a certain low bravery in that, but it will only bring the earth down atop us. Write a sonnet on the inside of the lid? Perhaps. None will ever see it, but it will be a thing of beauty that was not there before, a defiance to an uncaring cosmos. You recall the span of human life all the way to the earliest one-celled organism. What is the right of things?”

I had to remove my gauntlet to wipe my eyes. “I will not slay my father. You taught me everything.”

“I am but his shadow.”

“We could imprint you into an unborn child!”

“As population falls, this would lead to many souls within each one man.”

“And yet the Mind Song could coordinate all the disparate elements!”

“And preserve us until the Great South Watcher smites the gate. Preserve us for that creature! The doors of the House of Silence stand open even now to receive us. Will you see me preserved until I am lured to that place, from whence no sound, no voice, no song, no scream, ever is allowed to escape?”

“Is there no weapon against these horrors, my father? Will these creatures of light who, from time to time have manifested to preserve one lost man or another, can they do nothing to preserve the race?”

“Of what is unknown, nothing can be said. Will you pin your hopes on the Good Powers, if they are good indeed? Even though one held me in suspension for lo these many years, I still cannot tell what it was, or if it will come again. Slay me now, and let my essence spill into nothingness, so that I will not come intact and self-aware into the power of the enemy. That is my wish. You are my son.”

With words of lead, I said, “Father, I cannot. All the ancient life-force in me cries against it. Will I be the name of impiety forever? No son can slay his father.”

“You are confused and weak. When you return to the energized sheathe of air surrounding the pyramid, the Mind Song will balance your humors, and you will see straight again.”

So it was that with the slowest and most reluctant steps I returned through the infinite terror and danger of the Night Lands. Of that walking I will give a complete report to the Monstruwacans: here I will say only a little of what I saw. I slew a manlike shape covered with spines and bristles twice the height of a man, in a pit of smooth sand near a smoke-hole. This was a great monster, and the slaver of its jaws was nasty and beastlike.

In another place I came across a coven of Silent Ones who stood without motion along the crest of a barren hill, their hoods tilted toward each other, almost in the attitude men would take, who talked and consulted. I buried myself beneath the moss bush. These great and unearthly spirits passed near by to me, but I was not slain.

I saw a regiment of Night-Hounds standing in order before a creature that seemed an insect thing, all claws and crooked legs, yet made of mist that my eye could see through him. The hound-things were greater than a dray-horse of the ancient world. I have never heard report of intellect among the Night-Hounds, nor that they moved and drilled as armed men, in file and rank: and surely this was a great wonder, and I did not understand it. There was no wind, and they did not scent me: otherwise I surely would not have saved myself alive.

In another place I found a ruin that indicated that human beings indeed once had dwellings, smaller strongholds, out in the darkness away from the Great Redoubt: yet I saw the little bones they left, and my father told me these people slew their children and ate them, in order that they be accepted among the abhumans.

Elsewhere I saw the stones stir uneasily, and I felt in my spirit the powerful malice radiating from the ground, and I realized I walked among the eggs of some form of life made of a substance harder than rock, and it was by the mere unwatchfulness of the guardians there that I escaped.

In another time I heard music in the darkness, calling, and it was only through the intervention of my father's ghost that my life and sanity were preserved, for he said the Master Word to me, and I was reminded of human things, food and lamplight, clean water and the laughter of children, and by this means I resisted the pull. I feared for him, because to put his power out from the ghost-cell and touch me, he exposed himself naked in spirit to the miasma of the Night Land, if only for a moment. Yet he seemed to take no hurt.

When I passed through the gray dunes, I lost sight of the Great Redoubt, and was lost. I thought I was in some deep valley, whose tall walls no doubt blocked my vision of the mighty Hill of Life. Yet I followed the needle, and it pointed toward the source of the Earth Current, but I did not see the Last Redoubt before me, and neither did I find any wall or cloud blocking my sight. I felt the power of many human souls in my mind, so I knew I was near, and I saw the weird fires of the Country of Blue Fire to the North, and so I knew I was not blind.

Not until I came to the very place of the Great Redoubt, did I see that the upper stories, many of the cities and towers of the upper balconies, were dark. I did not know the terror that the Redoubt had fallen, because I still sensed the pulse of human life within, but I was filled with doubt and awe.

Closer I crept. I could smell the burning in the air, and I knew from the disturbances in the aether that a mighty battle had taken place here, and much of the Earth-Current had been expended to ward off an invisible pressure from the House of Silence. Of the corpses of Night-Hounds and slugs as vast as hills, there was beyond number heaped up in mounds before the Southeast Gate and the Southwest. I walked many hours to the North, till I came around the side of the pyramid: for the first time in all my life, the sight of the Northeast Watching Thing, that monster called Crowned Watcher, was lost, since a great pall of smoke hung over the Night Land in that direction, and, for once, the piercing horror of the many eyes watching us was blind. This great smoke was due to the discharges of weapons of an antique type. They had not been fired in perhaps three quarters of a million years, but the ancient and honorable guild of the Matrosses kept them in order.

There were scavenger-creatures among the many corpses gathered around, but they fled from the roar and flash of my Diskos. Once and twice abhumans spotted me, and threw stones, holding away from me and hooting for their comrades to come and slay: for they were wise enough not to come at me one at a time. But I pursued the first and killed it, and, not long after when another pelted me I gave chase, but he escaped with a wound to his leg, for he fell down a slope into a rushing creek of slime, and I dared not follow. Both times the creature-men were far from their bands, and walking alone.

I came upon two figures outlined against the dim and sacred glow of the electric circle so suddenly that I turned upon them with my weapon: but my Diskos, being wiser than I, could not strike, for these were men. The Master Word beat solemnly in the dark air.

“Here is one whose name I cannot say," said the first, “And I am Belphanes of the Savants. My order is that which oversees the oaths of men: if you have vowed to spare your father, I release you from that vow, and absolve you.”

I could see the Mind Song in their eyes. To me the Song was still silent. They were on one side of the tiny line of light which defines the Air Clog, and I was on the other.

“I will not kill my father," I said. “Where is justice in this? We are perfect men of a perfect age: we will resist the temptation to preserve our dead. They will perish with us, and escape the final dread. But to extinguish their memory before that time is madness. Where is the harm in it?”

The one unnamed to me said, “Friend, you have been alone, and your mind has wandered down strange paths. You know that there is one race of mankind who will come after us, fully human, a flourish for a few years, a brief and final golden age, before the abhumans learn the Master Word and come to occupy our beloved homes. Our children will not be able to resist the temptation.”

“That is not proved!” I shouted, the first time one human voice had been raised in anger against another in perhaps twenty thousand years or more.

That one said, “You may prove it. You are as our ancestors were, and as our descendents will one day be. Resist the temptation to cling to life when life endangers soul and sanity. Put the cylinder at your feet. To spare you, I am come, and I promise to shatter the casing with one blow, and with my weapon tuned so that no part of your father will escape and be tainted by the Night.”

I knew why he had not been introduced to me. It is not fitting that one whose duty it is to slay your loved ones be known to you.

Belphanes of the Savants shook his head toward that unnamed man. “Spare no words with him: his soul is isolated. As soon as he steps across the white circle, he will be in communion with us, and what must be done will be clear.”

Such was my grief and anger that I turned away. Perhaps I meant merely to run into the darkness, blindly, without goal. Or perhaps I thought the shattered strongholds filled with bones could be restored to energy and light, and I could live out my days alone, companioned only by my father's lifeless voice.

But whatever it was I thought, I saw, remote in the distance, where the great clouds of smoke had parted, merely the suggestion of a shadow within a shadow. One shadow was a low hill set with standing stones; the other was the outline of the House of Silence, and I saw the motionless little lights in the windows: and I saw its doors were open, as if inviting me to come inside. The allure of the doors was very great. I remember thinking that it would be a heroic deed to go there, since all the members of my race feared it, and I would see what they feared to look upon, the nameless and unsleeping power that dwelt inside that place.

The two men spoke the Master Word, but I did not hear it: and they dared not step over the electric circle, for at that moment it was grown terrifically bright, and I heard the groaning of engines buried beneath the great Redoubt, bringing up Earth-Current to the task.

The aetheric disturbance could have blown my soul into nothingness, as a puff of breathe blows out a candle: but the purpose of the House of Silence is ever to take, never to kill. And I stepped one step away from the electric circle, which now blazed like lightning on the ground.

My father spoke the Master Word to me, and his spirit seemed to reach up from the lantern-shaped cell I held and touch my face. This broke the spell. I stepped back across the circle, and, at that same moment of time, sanity and moral sense returned to me.

I saw from the dials on the casing that all my debate and hesitation had been for nothing. My father was rapidly dehumanizing. He had exposed himself to the full brunt of the silence of the Night Land to save me. Before the process could complete itself, before he was trapped for eternity in an agony such that no fleshly organism can imagine, I shattered the casing of the ghost-cell down at my feet: there was a flare of light where it broke against the lightning of the electric circle. That clean and pure electric essence of the Earth Current may have swept the stain away: his individuality and memory were gone. Not even an echo of the beloved soul remained.

“Why?” I called out in grief. “Why is this dark world as it is? Are all the promises of hope in vain?”

I felt the pressure of the silence, the soul-destroying emptiness, that issued from the House of Silence, creaking against the laboring barrier that protected us.

There was no other noise from the Night Lands to answer me, except, perhaps, the mocking echo of unearthly scorn from the Country Whence Comes Great Laughter.

The Last of All Suns

Circa AD TEN DECILLION VIGINTILLION

(The End of Eternity)

121. We Are Lost

We are lost in endless and titanic halls of windowless metal. Some of the things pursuing us are so large that, to them, even these halls are cramped, and the miters of the crawling sphinxes scrape flakes of debris from expanse of black plate above.

I say we are aboard a ship. The other men resurrected from the Archive disagree. Some think we are in hell, or in a fairy-mound, or suffering the hallucinations imposed by the thinking-machines of futuristic science.

Of all of us, the man from the latest period of humanity was from AD 29,000,000, some twenty-nine million years after my death. He came from an age long after the sun had died, a terror-haunted world of eternal darkness. His home was a titanic fortress called the Last Redoubt, a structure hulled against the infinite cold of a sunless sky, nursing its life on the last few embers of dying geothermal and geomagnetic heat. His name is Ydmos of Utter-Tower. Ydmos thinks this vessel is a redoubt like his, one long ago captured by the enemy, and that we are all buried far underground.

Even his era is uncountable years lost, compared to this present one. Earth was murdered more than fifteen billion years ago; the Milky Way, star by star, was consumed by darkness five billion years ago, and the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds as well. The great galaxy in Andromeda, her satellite galaxies M32 and M110, and Triagulum Galaxy in M33, are also gone: the spiral galaxies in Ursa Minor, Sculptor, Draco, Carina, Fornax: over the slow millennia, all are destroyed and vanished.

All the stars known to the astronomers of history are gone: the galaxies have tumbled together into a vast and central fire, the Last Of All Suns. At the core of this sun is one infinitely heavy point of nothingness where nine-tenths of the mass and energy of the universe are compressed.

Of the remaining tenth part of the substance of the universe, some lingers yet in the form of matter, including a remnant of red dwarf galaxies, their cores absorbed into black holes, their arms choked with exhausted nebulae that will never collapse against to form fresh stars. The dying galaxies are streaming toward the central fire, and, from our position in time and space, seem, to us, not yet to have been consumed. Perhaps that event has happened: the light from it has not reached us. Some of the remaining universal mass is in the form of energy: the residue of the universe has dropped to a uniform background radiation just above absolute zero.

And one infinitely small residuum of the dying cosmos is matter and energy lingering yet in the form of living creatures and their works: there is one ship left, with us aboard.

There is something else aboard as well, something horribly alien to our continuum, to life, to time and space and order. The ship is theirs: we are as rats in the hold.

122. The Shot

It was dark. A few fitful lanterns, perhaps a quarter mile up off the deck, perhaps fifteen billion years old, emitted sickly glints of greenish-yellow light. The pounding of numberless claws on the metal deckplates was like drumming rain.

The looming creature Ydmos called a Night-Hound came running ahead of a galloping pack of malformed hobgoblins. This breed of Night-Hound is a hard-skinned albino monster larger than a dray-horse, with a face like a hairless wolf and teeth like an alligator.

Ydmos raised his odd-looking weapon: it was a poleaxe tipped with a sharpened disk. The disk spun like a buzz saw, and a flare like lightning came from it, and a low roar like a lion’s roar. He swung, but the creature saved itself from a mortal blow to its thick neck by raising its forepaw into the blazing path of the weapon. The stroke chopped through scale and hide and muscle to part the monster's flesh from wrist to elbow. A fan of black and stinking blood flew up from the wound, and the creature screamed even more loudly than the lightning-roaring weapon.

The Night-Hound reared up on his hindquarters, one huge fore-limb hanging limply, and slashed down with its other. Its palm was wide as a dinner plate, its nails longer than dirks. Ydmos fell.

I lifted my trusty Holland & Holland elephant gun to my shoulder —or the dream thing, whatever it was, that pretended to be my fine old beauty of the gunsmith’s craft—and squeezed the trigger. The trigger had pull; the heft of the weapon was right. It felt heavy in my hands, trusted and familiar.

The rifle was solid. I could feel the grain of the wood against my cheek as I brought it to my shoulder, I could see the tiny scratches and irregularities in the polished barrel. The sites cast a very tiny shadow on the curved surface of the barrel. It was real. I had faith in it.

I fire a 900-grain slug at nearly four tons of muzzle-energy. The slug is thicker than my thumb, and you can knock over a tree with it, at short ranges. The familiar smell of cordite, cotton soaked in nitro, rose to my nostrils. (For a moment, a terrible moment, I was convinced this was all a dream, and that I would wake up again in the Veldt, the hot sun throwing a zebra-striped pattern of shadows from the long grass against my tent walls, and Lisa outside, looking pretty in her jodhpurs and pith helmet, calling me a slowpoke and telling me the game was getting away. For a moment.)

Fortunately, the matter-wizard Abraxander-the-Threshold (from Tau Ceti, circa AD 30,000) had also been able to materialize a heavy jacket with a padded shoulder. Even with this padding, the kick jarred my shoulder painfully. Either my imagination had over-charged the shells with powder, or I was weaker now than I had been when I was alive.

The Night-Hound went down as if felled by a hammer, its massive head half-severed at its horny collarbones, its chest blown open. I could see ribs, sliding chest-muscles, pumping lung tissue. Black blood streamed from its shattered neck and chest, and flooded across the deck. The stench was terrible. Even dead, its jaws continued to snap, and its legs continued to kick, and the barbs in his tail went in and out like the stringer in a dead wasp does.

You would think the creatures from hell, or from outer space, would be used to loud noises. It seemed not. All the monsters quailed at the report, shocked. A terrible silence hung in the corridor for a long, strange moment. The echoes of the shot reverberated through the ship, farther and farther, echo answering echo.

The monsters ran away.

123. The Laughter

Kitimil, the shaggy man, gripped the bone he used as a truncheon in his teeth, dropped to all fours, and scampered doglike across the deck toward Ydmos, and his wolfskin pelt flapped on his hairy back as he ran. If I am right, Kitimil is a Neanderthal, or some other pre-human homonid, the earliest of us, even as Ydmos was the latest. The method the Blue Man uses to discover our dates returns no reading from the Neanderthal, or so he says. (The Blue Man claims he is measuring of the regular decay of certain particles in our bodies—but how can these be our original bodies?) Kitimil may be from the future, after an age of degeneration, rather than from the past.

“It is too late!” I called, “Leave him!”

But I was wrong. The Neanderthal saw or sensed something I did not. The fingers of the gauntlet of Ydmos flexed slightly. His pole-arm was laying a foot or so to his right, its heavy disk-shaped ax-blade dark, not spinning. But when his hand trembled, the weapon slid across the deck, as if pulled by an invisible thread, into his grasp, and the blade lit up with terrible energy again.

Even as the main body of the monsters fled from us, there came a sound like a laugh both very near at hand, and from very many miles away, perhaps on another deck. It was one sound, coming from two different points in space. It was a large laugh, larger than an elephant’s lungs could have made. It was as if a hillside laughed, or a world, and we felt it in our bones.

That laugh made us flee in panic, despite our temporary victory. We ran from the monsters who were running from us, both sides fleeing the other. This is more common in irregular skirmishes than you might imagine: officers rarely report it when it happens, for no one can explain, later, why you run from someone you’ve routed. Panic happens in war.

Ahead of us was a place where a lantern had fallen, making a 100-yard wide crater in the deckplates. Even panicked, we were wise enough to turn aside, giving the thing wide berth as we circled the crater; the radiations leaking from the damaged glass were deadly. But the light was brighter here because of it, giving us a glimpse of what lay ahead: before us, we saw the whole tremendous width of the corridor was filled with an encroaching black mist, and the lanterns overhead were winking out, one by one. In the depth of the mist could be glimpsed pale and quivering mounds of flesh, the bodies of enormous slugs, large as freight trains, crawling blindly toward us, quite without noise.

To my left, I saw a wide hatch swing quietly open. This section of bulkhead was between two buttresses, half-hidden in the dim light. I saw, through the open hatch, a set of metal stairs, going down and down.

The Neanderthal pointed toward the valve with his bone truncheon, beckoning us, and he gave a soft hoot. He did not wait to see if we followed, but, with Ydmos still across his back, the shaggy man was away, scooting on all fours down the stairs.

I hissed softly, afraid to raise my voice, but Kitimil did not answer. Gloom swallowed him.

Mneseus, the sorcerer-king from Atlantis, and Enoch the antediluvian, both sprinted toward the stairs. The Blue Man, who was calling himself Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss today, never does anything in a hurry, and so he strolled in a leisurely saunter after them. The Cave-Man or Redskin or whatever—he was named He-Sings-Death—came and stood near me, his spear in its spear-thrower held lightly at his shoulder, his eyes turned intently toward the approaching wall of mist, the silent masses of blind slug-flesh. He bounced on his toes in an agony of impatience: he obviously wanted to flee down the stair, and escape this wide expanse of open corridor, but did not want to abandon gray-haired Abraxander, or me.

I mistrusted the stairs: I felt we were being herded. But in a small company of eight men, leaderless, whoever is the most rash will lead, and the rest must follow or allow the company to be scattered.

I trudged down the stairs into the gloom, rifle ready, Abraxander-the-Threshold on slippered feet, coming in a silken rustle of robes behind me. He-Sings-Death, silent as a cat, came after, watching backwards for signs of pursuit, his spear-hand at his shoulder, elbow high, tense and ready to cast.

We all flinched when the valve came quietly shut behind us, cutting off the lamplight from the corridor.

124. The Rifle I Had Dreamed

I must explain how I held a weapon from a world, and a solar system, and a galaxy, long ago dissolved.

Four sleeps ago (and our sleeps were of no even length: the hours were unknown; no sun shined, no churchbell rang, in this coffin of black steel larger than worlds), another member of our dwindling company, a matter-wizard named Abraxander-the-Threshold, had somehow materialized this weapon from my past. “Fleshed it from Dreaming” so he said: that I had known and loved it in life allowed him (somehow) to find it or recreate it from out of the abyss of years.

At first, the firearm had been a thing of gossamer, a ripple that I could only see from the corner of my eye. When I was nodding into restless sleep in a hidden closet of steel where we cowered, only then could I feel the weight in my hand.

Three sleeps ago, I woke from a dream about my rifle to find its shadow in my hand. At that time, the stock was a mere line of cigarette smoke, with a translucent smudge for a lock, a blurred cloud for a barrel. We fled from trolls who came from the darkness toward us, and I did not attempt to shoot.

When I slept and woke again, the weapon was made of colored glass that faded in and out of view. The Sound we think heralds the coming of the Thing-That-Spins passed near us, and half the company did not answer when we counted off in the pitch dark. There was no target then, nor later when hissing, chuckling shapes made of luminous vapor overtook the slower runners.

I think the raid on the pantry was that evening. Or had that been earlier? We needed water, and we found creatures enough like humans to have a supply. The near-humans seemed to be made of flesh, and time passed for them as it did for us. They bowed before a Shape like a pale mask that hung in the midst of a gray cloud above the deck, and when tendrils of cloud plucked up two of the near-humans, they screamed in voices like ours, and the blood they shed was red. We waited in silence, hidden, till the manifestation of the Pallid Mask had withdrawn, leaving only mortal and three-dimensional enemies in the chamber.

We rushed against them: Crooked-armed near-humans who wielded glassy knives, giants armed with maces and flails, and dripping monsters who looked like disease-crusted boars were our foes. Here also was one iron-faced Hag the size of an open-air butcher’s shop I saw once in Ivory Coast, and a smell not less putrid.

The Giants panted and hooted and grinned at us, and we lost ten men for every one of them we toppled with grapnel and line. The Hag crouched behind the Giants and snatched any of our fallen she could reach with her ever-lengthening worm-arms, and tossed them lightly into her stew-pot: it was Ydmos who cleaved her in two, though her left half, which lived on, swatted him with her claw-foot, and sent him tumbling with a blow that would have killed a smaller man. Others of our band held her hopping foot at bay with spears and lengths of pipe until Ydmos found his feet again, and ran back with this weapon held high in both hands, its blade blazing like a St. Catherine’s wheel. My rifle still was too soft and dreamlike to be of any use: I fought with a machete.

Today, as I woke, my rifle had been like a colored painting, very authentic to the eye, but oddly slick and buoyant in my grip. It cast no shadow on the ground. It had no odor to it, and when I flicked a fingernail against the barrel, or worked the bolt, there was no noise. But when the time came to fire it, it fired.

125. The Men Of Many Aeons

I had been resurrected in the Archive earlier than most of the others. It was never clear what the faceless creatures wanted with us: we could not communicate with them. They were not alive.

As the Archive burned, the tall silent shapes on the far side of the chamber raised their thin hands and motioned for a horde of lantern-eyed things to gather us in. The humans ran, scattered.

There may have been as many as a million of us at first. How many hours we were hunted through the lightless halls and corridors, each army of us rushing in a different direction, down corridors taller than the nave of a cathedral, through darkened chambers vaster than caverns, I cannot number.

After an hour of panicked flight, some eight hundred of us, cut off from the others, found ourselves in a storage bay. Here, thankfully, there was no huge watching beast, larger than a mountain, waiting without noise or motion or any sign of life for human souls to enter in.

There was a strange assembly, during which we debated our fate. We came from periods so far scattered in time, that only a few of us knew the names of the lands or the ages of the others. Something like dread crept over me, when I realized that, of all the men of my future, none of them knew of the outcome of the Great War, or recalled the names of the nations involved. Only two of the men there knew what the Roman Catholic Church had been, or the Roman Empire: one man knew of England, but no one knew of New England. Even those ages, far past my own, that had some record of flying machines, could not name the brothers who had invented it, or the country from which they had come, any more than I could name the name and country of the inventor of the wheel, or the lever, or the bow.

It was equally strange to see how few of the gathering joined in the debate. Many of the men there came from ages where slavery and servitude were unquestioned, and they came from classes and ranks who dared not speak up while their betters decided their fate for them. Most of these were men both courageous and strong, who had done wondrous deeds during the riot and the escape: but they came from ages where the Agora of Athens, the Magna Charter, the American Revolution, and the Bill of Rights, were as unknown as the flying machine.

During the assembly, I convinced the others to climb down, not up. From the way the chains and hanging corpses we had passed were swinging, from the Coriolis irregularities in the pendulum-motion, and also from how our footfalls seemed heavier was we descended, I was convinced this world was a cylinder, being spun for gravity: though only the men of the times future to me understood me. I thought our hope lay in finding the bottom deck, which would be the outermost, the hull.

Many were convinced, merely from the noises we had heard from overhead, to travel away from those noises, and down, for we had heard the rustling and chuckling of hooded figures passing from balcony to balcony, and the weird, slow, unearthly echoes from the Voice That Calls Out.

Bal Nergal of Shinar, who had upended and shattered the nine-headed thing, was selected to lead the eight hundred.

Eight hundred men! There were no women, no children, among us, and only a few graybeard men. We were sound of limb. None of us had come back from the dead in ill health. One would think we would have stood some sort of chance.

Our numbers dwindled so rapidly. There was no time for funerals or prayers. The hunger-things came up the stairs at us, and we escaped only when so many our dead and dying choked the stairwell landing that the things could not gnaw through. Later, as we fought our way past the vast valve leading from what I thought might be the engineering deck, a shining tetrahedron killed a hundred men merely by hovering over them quietly. Later still, a many-angled arm, pale as ice, reached through was seemed to be a hole or rip hanging in midair, and plucked up dozens of us at a swipe: I saw the eyes of the man right next to me as the hand closed on him. Not long after, the gray-robed shapes drifted into view, and slew us at a distance, with some invisible, quiet power that froze the heart. Men to either side of me clutched their chests and fell: I know not why I was spared.

Snow killed other men, silent and white, which gathered on the deckplates as they slept, leaving those of us not two yards away unharmed. Other men poisoned themselves when they lapped up this snow, hoping despite the smell that it might be made of frozen water. Then, as we fled from the sound of a screaming whistle in the dark, a glass door fell down that severed the company in half, and our lost men beat against the transparent panels with blood gushing from their nostrils, lips, and eyes. After that, during the raid on the pantry deck, we fell beneath clubs and knives and the dripping nails of the Hag. We died and we died.

One hundred hours later, there were only eight of us left.

126. The Uprising

I am not sure what originally had caused the revolt in the Archive chamber. The manifestation of the Slowly Turning Oblong had folded itself back into nothingness, as if it were preoccupied by other business.

Once it was gone, the seventeen ponderous behemoths that looked like headless elephants with massive crab-claws jutting from their neck-holes, who had been arrayed in a vast circle around the Oblong, opened their horrid claw-faces, and gathered darkness around them like scarves, and either turned invisible or dematerialized.

The attendants who had been cleaning the scaly flesh of the Behemoths were horrible, trembling, thin shapes that looked like eyeless albino insects or strange and leafless trees of flesh: they had put down their hooks and long scalpels and skittered away on their shivering toe-blades not long after.

The gargoyle thralls tending the resurrection machinery were not human, perhaps not members of the animal kingdom, but they were made of matter and existed in three dimensions: they died whenever their bone helmets were dashed in by a heavy crowbar or impaling pole snatched up from the wreckage of the ancient machines littering the torture-yard floor.

Some accident had caused the coffins to open all at once, more than the thralls could manage, and hundreds of thousands of men from previous ages, screaming, bewildered, puking up cryogenic fluid, came shaking and staggering into existence.

During the confusion, a gigantic man, fierce as a bull elephant, had made a prodigious leap to the upper deck space where the hunched statues of the Overseers crouched. It turned out that the large nine-headed Overseer (who we all thought was obviously the master of the others) was not made of stone at all, but of some strange form of frozen flesh: flesh that broke and shattered and bled gray ink when the huge man toppled it from its pedestal down onto the iron floorplates of the archive.

The giant's name was Bal Nergal of Shinar. He ruled and died circa 2250 BC. He is of the race Enoch calls the Nephilim, who ruled the Earth in antediluvian times.

The cry of triumph from the Nephilim echoed from the vast black walls, balcony upon balcony of empty coffins. Before the echoes died, the answering cry from countless tens of thousands of men rang out, a cry of rage and fear and rebellion. In the few moments of pandemonium, the gargoyles were slain, the guardian-machines were smashed, and the immense rugose cones of the Librarian-fungi were torn tendril from tendril.

From behind the banks of rusted black machines rose flames. The Archive was burning. In the light of the leaping flames, we saw, very tall and far away, against a distant wall, silhouettes of creatures that had been silently watching our rebellion, their massive heads hanging over the forty-story tall banks of ancient machinery, their narrow eyes without expression.

A million men broke and fled.

127. In The Viewing Table Chamber

Following the shaggy man, we few fled down the stair. At the bottom, there was but one gate open, leading into a cabin larger than the largest building of any city I had known in life. Like most of the cabins aboard this nameless ship, there was no guessing its original purpose. An amphitheater, perhaps?

In that place, the eight of us, the last survivors, hid, not speaking.

We took positions behind some of the tables and machines bolted to the wall opposite the valve were we had entered, and waited there in silence for a time, panting. Every man’s bloodshot eye was wide; every hand was tight on the weapons, archaic or futuristic, that trembled in our grip.

The air was foul, as if a fire had been here, once. In the center of the chamber was a sunken area: concentric rows of seats, each row lower than the last, descended a slope to surrounded a square floor of glass. The glass floor was an acre wide. Light shined upwards from this floor, smoky beams in the dust and fog of the cabin, and sent a trembling circle of light against the ceiling. We did not approach the light, for it seemed strange, and our experiences with strange lights in his haunted ship made us wary. We were not near enough the glass to see what was below it, shedding the light.

Ydmos was the first to recover his composure. He doffed his helmet, and, made a gesture to the Blue Man. The Blue Man holstered the little glass tube he uses as his pistol, and wound a bandage around Ydmos' head, stanching the bloodflow with purplish drips of sweat from his blue palms. I was amazed that Ydmos lived; but he soon stood and spoke as if no pain reached him. The men of the farthest future were made of stern stuff indeed.

Ydmos broke the silence, saying in a cool and dispassionate voice: “Treason is here. They were led to us; but then they pulled back when we were in their power, as if by signal. One among us talks with them. I heard it with the Night-Hearing.”

You would think a time like this, when one is accusing someone in the company of being a traitor, that this would be a time when a man would hold his weapon tightly. But, instead, Ydmos put the wheel-bladed pole-axe he carried to one side of him.

Unnaturally, the pole-arm stood upright by itself, like a flag-pole, with no hand to help it balance. There was still a shimmer lingering on the edge of the disk-blade, and where the shimmer passed, the bloodstains were absorbed into the substance of the metal and vanished. I could not put aside the impression that the weapon of Ydmos was a living thing, a loyal boar-hound licking its chops.

I said, “If you heard it with your brain, if you heard a telepathic message, the traitor must be one of the three mind-readers in our group.”

He made a curt, cutting gesture with the side of his hand, which I assume meant the same thing a shake of the head would mean. “The disturbance in the aether came from us, but was not one of us. It came from the dark, the under-thought.”

Ydmos spoke in his odd language, but the hypnosis or telepathy or whatever it had been (which he and Bal Nergal the Nephilim earlier had performed), allowed us to understand his words.

The language was called the Outer Tongue, for it was only spoken when outside the Last Redoubt, his home. His people had a different language spoken when inside the walls. Since his home, his world, and everything he knew was as far lost in the past as everything any of us had known of our homes, he would never speak the Inner Tongue again.

The Outer Tongue is soft, meant to be spoken only in a whisper, and has many flexible terms for enemy movements and emergency responses in a very few syllables. There are different word-endings for the degree and type of danger: physical, mental, or spiritual, and one-syllable modifiers to indicate if the attack is microscopic, fourth-dimensional, technological, or supernatural.

He-Sings-Death, the Cave-Man with the painted face, spoke, “He is like a horse being ridden, this one of us? He does not know what he is carrying? Possessed, but the shade is quiet?”

Ydmos said: “In the Mighty Home of Man, evolution weeded out those souls vulnerable to aetheric dominion over countless generations: you come from millennia before that evolution began. One of my people could not be possessed unawares, without an act of invitation, corruption, surrender. They know the nerve-energy discipline, they could sense of vibration of alien thought. But you are not of my people: I do not know your strengths.”

His cool and colorless eyes passed across the seven of us. “One here, knowingly or unknowingly, has bowed to the House of Silence, and only thinks he is a man. Will any of us confess?” he used the special word-form to indicate a moral danger to the group.

Odd. Apparently he did not think the traitor (if traitor there was) would physically harm us. Was the moral danger he feared the danger his own words put us in, the danger of suspicion, disunity?

128. The Squire Of The Last Redoubt

If all human history, from the first cavemen to the Last Child, were compressed into a single year, then Ydmos came from thirty minutes to midnight, December 31st. On that scale, Christ was born an hour past noon of January 1st. I come from an hour and forty minutes later, during the Great War in Europe; and Abraxander, from the year AD 30000, was born two hours before midnight of the same day.

On that scale, the agrarian revolution, the rise and fall of the Empire of Rome, the rise and fall of three separate spacefaring civilizations over thirty millennia, all were over before January 2nd: and months of sunlessness covered all the million-year-long hours from later February to the end of December.

Ydmos was dressed a mottled blue-gray-black armor, blotched with irregular camouflage, as if meant to blend into a landscape of ash and dirty ice. His armor was not metal, not wood, not any substance I recognized: bulky as it was, it made no noise at all when he moved, nor did his bootsoles ring against the deck.

A wide mantle of gray fabric rippled from his shoulder-plates. Even from a pace or two away, I could feel the heat radiating from it, as if from a stove. It was made for a clime colder than the arctic.

His helmet was also blue-gray, with cheekplates, crown, and the skirt around the back to protect the neck, were all one featureless curving surface of dull hue. His people put no decoration on their helmets: no plumes, no brave crests. There was neither beaver nor visor, but he must have had some method of opening and shutting the Y-shaped gap in the front, where his large eyes and solemn mouth were sometimes visible. I never saw it change, but sometimes the opening seemed covered over with transparent metal, sometimes it seemed merely an empty opening. In battle, the opening vanished, and the face of the helm was blind and blank, and I do not know how he saw his target.

There were no visible joints anywhere in the armor, though it was bulky and hard. If you were looking right at his elbow when he swung his ponderous weapon, sometimes the light would ripple slightly at the joint-surface, as if the metal itself were changing shape, or made of something both finer and harder than mere matter. I wondered if the armor was alive, as the disk-weapon was.

I had seen the stinger-tail of a Mantachore bounce off that breastplate: I doubted my shell could penetrate it. I also have a machete that Abraxander dreamed into matter for me: but there was no way my one-handed blade could parry the forty or fifty pounds of spinning, electrically-charged buzz-saw battle-axe thing that Ydmos swung with his mighty arms.

I concluded that if Ydmos thought I was the traitor, I would not live long. Since I had seen his pole-arm, as if by magnetic pull, jump into his hand when needed, I was not comforted by his pretending to place it beyond his reach.

129. I Am Vouched For

He-Sings-Death is tall and thin, dark-skinned with lank, dark hair, which he braids and decorates with bones and beads and feathers. His face is stained with woad, and his jacket is uncured leather from a red deer. His dirk is dark flint, and hangs from a lanyard and thong about his neck; his javelins are tipped with flint as well. I thought it odd that he asked for paint and feathers from Abraxander-the-Threshold when the matter-wizard was trying to materialize our gear for us: I suppose he thought it odd that I asked for a shaving-razor.

He throws his spear with a lever called an atlatl or woomera. It is about two feet long, with a handgrip at one end and a spur at the other. I have seen him hit a monster square in the eye at 150 yards with a javelin launched from it.

The Blue Man says He-Sings-Death hails from 14,500 BC. Once, when we were encamped in a dark box near an empty stairwell, He-Sings-Death used his remaining woad dye to paint the walls with beautiful pictures of an Irish Elk in flight. With only three colors, chalk-white, indigo and dull red, He-Sings-Death made the majestic antlers, the shining coats, the bunched muscles of the fleet-footed Elk come alive. It was a painting by someone who saw and hunted and admired the beast. The last of them vanished 11,000 years before my time. He-Sings-Death "signed" the painting by leaving a blue handprint.

On the opposite wall, he painted a hulking shape of the kiln giants that had been following us, and he used this for target practice: "so that the tooth of the spear will come to know the taste of him, and yearn to strike true!” he said, and laughed. He laughs the way a child might, tossing his hair and throwing his head back.

He spoke to the flint spear-points of his weapons, praising them when they struck, and chiding them when they did not. Perhaps it was a voodoo he believed in earnest; perhaps it was target-practice; perhaps it was merely his sense of humor.

He laughed now. “Ydmos, he says there is one here. One here who follows the Smothering Man, He-Chokes-Song. But Ydmos, he hears in the night. He knows. He sees hearts. So, then! So, then! Who can he not hear? Who has a hidden heart?”

I knew from previous talks with him, that the devil of his tribal lore was called He-Chokes-Song. This was a spirit of darkness, born of the waste left over after the Creator made the world on the pottery wheel of the rotating heavens. The left-over spirit stuff could find no place in the world for itself, and so bent itself to the task of tormenting and destroying the happy men who did have a place in the world. It was the not unreasonable conclusion of He-Sings-Death that we were in a cave where this devil and his servants, corrupted from once-wholesome creatures, dwelled.

Ydmos did have some sort of telepathy he called "Night-Hearing" that the men of the far future used to sense the shape and nature of the menaces from the Night Lands around their Last Redoubt. He-Sings-Death was asking a rather clever question: which one of us could block the Night-Hearing, the telepathy, of Ydmos?

He-Sings-Death now made a shuffling dance with his doe-skin-clad feet, turning this and that. He held his spear in hand, in its thrower, at his shoulder, so that the long shaft slanted down his back. He chanted in a high, thin, funny-sounding voice "Who can it be? Who can it be?” and bent his head as if to stare in surprise at his own feet in their rapid slithering patter. I do not know if he meant this to work a magic, but he was smiling as he danced, a smile I have seen on him when he makes a joke.

Now he stood in the middle of our rough circle. We were all staring at him. His back was to me. He straightened up.

He-Sings-Death said, “Not Captain Powell. His heart is bright: he has the eye of the hunting-dog when he hunts; he holds the iron thunder. Did you not see the black beasts flee when the thunder spoke?”

Ydmos said, “Do not praise his noisy weapon: the creatures of the Night Lands are drawn to loud reports, and firearms tempt men to slay monsters afar-off, instead of close at hand. Such weapons anger what should be left quiet.”

I thought this a cold thing to say, considering that I had just saved his life with my firearm. But I decided that a polite reply was best. “No matter the temptation, sir, I will only be tempted five more times to slay a monster far off. I have but six shells left, and I am saving the last one for myself. Unless Mr. Threshold can make more?” (Casually, I looked toward Abraxander) “Can you, sir? Or can any of you make us better arms, or restore our supplies? Some of you are warlocks and who-knows-what. Mr. Bliss the Blue Man seems to be able to create tools out of his fluid.” (Casually, I pointed my barrel toward the Blue Man) “Or perhaps master Kitimil the Shaggy Man (if man he be) he could teach us to make clubs from bone.”

I raised my voice (for the shaggy man was squatting on the top of some oblong metal casket, gazing toward the center of the room). “What are you anyway? A Neanderthal? Or something from the end of the world?”

The Blue Man and Abraxander-the-Threshold turned to look at Kitimil, as if expecting a reply.

130. The Shaggy Man

Kitimil, the Shaggy Man, did not answer. He did not seem overly concerned at the idea of a traitor in our midst. He was a squat fellow, but so thick through the shoulders and chest as to look almost hunch-backed. He sniffed the air with his monkey-nose.

When I spoke, a long moment passed before he cocked his head at me.

I think Kitimil is one of the three members of the group who reads minds, but I cannot decipher his expressions. His eyes are as green as jade, and they shine from between the hairs of his unkept brow like the eyes of a tiger crouched in the tall grass of Rhodesia.

Hs brow is heavy and cragged like the brow of an ape, so that his eyes are always in shadow, wolf-green staring out from dark pits. His face is wide at the cheekbones, and through the tangled black beard, ribs of muscle surrounded a wide, dog-fanged mouth. His jaw was like a blunt anvil. His weapon was the thighbone of an antelope: he dressed in shaggy wolf hide. I would swear he was homonid of some other species than our own, save that I have seen sailors on packet boats out of Istanbul or Macao as thick-featured, hard-faced, wild and dark as he.

He spoke in his language of coughs and clicks. Once again, the spiritualistic or animal-magnetic process of whatever it was that Ydmos and Nergal had done before translated the words for us.

The shaggy man was saying: “What is that light? What is that light?”

He came up onto his hind legs, and raised his bone truncheon and pointed, he said, “It is the light of the last sun. All-of-all now dies. Night-of-night now falls. There will be no dawn. In the hunting band, the virgins carry a coal from fire to fire, that when one fire dies, another will be born. Where is the coal for the new dawn? Who will make the new all-of-all?”

He coughed (a laugh? Or a sound of sorrow?) and concluded: “Why these people? Why this place? The path, it leads through dark brush, dark and tangled, but there is sun in the glade beyond. My mate, Magigi, waits. We dance then. Then, the light. Not now, the light: the dark is now.

“Who carries the coal to bring back the fire of the world? For the path is full of thorns.”

This was the most he had spoken since he pulled me from my library coffin. I wondered at his words. His mate?

And, when no one answered him, he turned his face from us with a snort of disgust, and stared back toward the shimmering light. He muttered, as if to himself, “You are forgetting people, after-people, wrong-head-looking people. The coal is here with us. Do not look for the serpent among us: he is nothing.”

He-Sings-Death laughed again and stamped his feet on the deck, making a dull drum-boom. We all looked back toward him.

He-Sings-Death was saying, “Kitimil, I name him He-Speaks-Like-Man. He is crooked-hearted, but his heart is plain. His heart is wet with tears. Can He-Chokes-Song cry human tears? Not him! Not him! Why do you look at him?”

I took this to mean that He-Sings-Death was vouching for Kitimil as well. But I wondered who among us would vouch for He-Sings-Death? Of all the company, he was my closest comrade, but he could not truly know that I was not infected by the enemy, possessed, ghost-ridden, no more than I could know it of him.

He-Sings-Death spoke in a deeper voice, harshly. “But here is one whose heart is hidden and dark. He hears voices, and he obeys. Is this not a way of the Smothering Man? Let him show himself to be clean! Speak!”

He was facing Mneseus, the Sorcerer-King from Atlantis.

He-Sings-Death drew back his spear-hand and raised his weapon to smite.

131. King Of The Drowned Land

Mneseus of Atlantis had not spoken since the battle. He sat, his unstrung bowstaff in hand, on the edge of a machine housing, but his head was bowed, and his left hand covered his face.

Slowly, he raised his face. His eyes were wet and red.

Mneseus said: “I shall speak. Noble sirs, ghosts of the future, my descendants, hear me: it is seen that there were neither bride nor child among those stirred again to life in the dark coffins. Is it not strange, that men only were brought to life, and no sister, no daughter, no mother of our race, glancing-eyed, dark-haired, with shining limbs?

“Once, I stood beneath the bright sun all-seeing, beside the wine-dark sea. The Sybil of the Serpent-Shrine at Dolphins, she said that there is a land beyond the fields of Asphodel: Father Time, Chronos, would perish, and the Eternal Universe, Ouranos, will halt the turning of the years. The grate of Hades would be stove in, and the shades made flesh again. All lovers would be reunited.”

Mneseus was a very dignified-looking fellow, polite and grim in the way soldiers who have seen too much combat often have. Even jolly little Huc-huc Pounce (back before the dire-worms took him) had not been able to make Mneseus laugh. He dated from somewhere older than 4000 B.C.

Abraxander-the-Threshold had conjured him a voluminous white mantle, which he wore draped over his chest and arms like you might see in classical sculpture.

His shirt was linen and his leather skirt was hemmed with gold pebbles. Shields or plates of bronze and oxhide hung over his chest and back: there were shining greaves on his calves, and he wore a leather sleeve on his right arm to protect it from the bowstring.

His helm was of a design that looked strangely modern to me: it looked like a flat pie-plate of bronze, tied in a complex tangle with two ribbons under and around his chin. Atop the helmet was a coronet of white poplar leaves, tied with purple ribbon. He had insisted Abraxander create for him a flask of oil, with which he anointed his limbs, so that they shone: he seemed to think this more important than his tunic or mantle or skirt.

A small cylindrical quiver of metal hung over one shoulder, and his arrows clashed when he ran. He was the swiftest afoot of all of us, fleeter even than He-Sings-Death.

The bow shot silvery arrows tipped with ampoules of glass and metal. There was some sort of magic or forgotten science to arrowheads, for he had to prepare them or charge them with an amber rod he wore at his belt. When the arrows were charged, there was a smell like summer lighting in the air. When he shot a monster with an arrow, even the smallest wound would make the monster dance and leap, limbs jerking, and drop dead.

Was it an electrical charge of some sort? I kept expecting a flash of lighting or a thunderclap to come from the flying shafts of the wizard from Atlantis, but it never came. When he strung his bow, there was just a silent sense of pressure in the air, like you feel before a thunderstorm.

Mneseus held the bow unstrung now, and he was seated on the edge of a machine casing, but his posture was kingly, and the bowstaff in his hand seemed a scepter.

Mneseus looked up at He-Sings-Death, and stared him eye to eye, and called out in a ringing voice: “Now is the time, is it not? Now is the hour when Ouranos, who created Cosmos from Chaos, returns from exile to claim his kingdom, and end the tyranny of Time, his wicked son. And—? And—?”

He lowered his bow staff and waved it left and right, pointing to one side of the chamber, and the other. I looked. The were tall square shapes, like abandoned machines, things that looked like dull tall mirrors, and, in the center of the room, the very wide sunken amphitheatre of chairs, all facing the floor of glass. There was that mysterious light shining from the sunken glass floor in the center of the chamber.

“I see her not,” He said at last, dropping his hand.

I said, “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but who would you be looking for?”

He looked at me. His eyes were tilted, like the eyes of a Chinaman, but the pupils were silvery, a color I had never seen in a human before.

He said softly, “My queen, the witch Parthenope. She repented of her crimes, freed the maidens of her tower, and consented to age and die as other women do. She threw her bowl where she mixed poisons into the sea, though the hag-goddess of the dark of the moon was angered at her for her ingratitude. My queen used her wisdom thereafter to heal the sick, and to calm the storms at sea. When she perished, a pine tree grew up upon her grave. The augurs told me this was a sign of everlasting life. A halcyon nested in the branches.

“Where is she?” Mneseus continued. “All lovers are to be reunited at the end of time. Now is the Eschaton. Where is my wife?”

The voice of Mneseus was heavy with grief.

He-Sings-Death still menaced him with his javelin.

I said to He-Sings-Death, “Mr. Singer, you told us the devil cannot weep, but His Majesty clearly has been. Put down the weapon, and let us use our wits to find the traitor here.”

He-Sings-Death hesitated.

Mneseus looked at him with contempt. “Strike, then, barbarian, and rid this iron hell of one more grieving soul. What care I for your suspicions? None are worthy to stand in judgment over me. Strike! And piece my heart: it is pained with weeping, and no more to be called a man's heart. Where, O Hercules! Where is my virtue gone?”

All at once he stood, put his sandal to his bow, bent and strung it. In one smooth motion he snatched an arrow from his quiver, touched it to the amber at his belt, fit it to the string, and raised the bow and drew the string back to his ear. The room throbbed with an unseen power: I smelled lighting in the air.

He pointed the arrow at He-Sings-Death. “You stood idle while my shining hands strung my death-bestowing bow, which slays men. Why did you allow me? That was folly.”

He-Sings-Death smiled, but his voice shook. He had seen what the arrows of Mneseus could do.

The painted Cave Man said, “Three spirits made the world: He-Knows-All, He-Gives-Gifts, He-Spares-Men. He-Spares-Men has told us that it is wrong to kill a brother. But I do not know what you are! Are you a man who eats flesh cooked with fire, as other men do? Or are you the serpent hidden with us? If you are not the serpent hidden with us, why did you say poison words into my ear about Captain Powell, He-Holds-Iron-Thunder?”

Because of the strain of holding the bowstring taut, Mneseus could only speak through clenched teeth. “Hah! Is mine eye the only open eye here? None other has seen it. Enough! I am not your tutor, barbarian. I am armed, and you have taken weapons up against me. Will you strike now? Or else I let fly!”

I said, “Your Majesty, you seem to know things, even what a person is thinking before he speaks. Are you a mind-reader? Is there someone among us who is not thinking like a human being?”

Mneseus said, “My daemon speaks to me. Why were you spared? I saw the Cold Hand pluck men up from your left and right. I saw the Pyramid pass over you. I saw the envenomed snow fall softly on the faces of the men. But not on your face. Always, always, men die to the side left of you, and to the right, and before you and behind, but you are spared. They do not smite you. Have you taken their coin?”

I said, “Ydmos said the traitor might be possessed without the traitor himself knowing it. Might it be me?”

Mneseus now swung to turn the bow toward me. I smelled ozone.

He said through clenched teeth. “A cold hand touches my neck. There is a ker among us, sleeping, perhaps, like a dragon coiled in the bottom of the belly. From time to time, it stirs, but it does not wake. It is near: perhaps it is in me. Or you! Do you understand me? You yourself, Pwyll, said it might be you, but unknown to you. So it might be of any of us. There is one solution. The door is open.”

“Door? What door?”

The muscles in his arm were trembling, but the arrowhead was steady, and he did not relax his draw. Mneseus hissed: "The door through which we were pulled to come from there to here. The door the fifty-headed hound must guard.”

Ydmos said softly, “He means the Capsule.”

The words did not mean much to me, but something in his tone made a shiver go up my spine.

I said, “With three mind-readers here, we cannot figure out which one of us is inhabited by this – this thing?”

Mneseus said sharply, “This is no riddle for us to puzzle over and solve! There is no solving of this, only ending! It lives in one of us. When we all slay ourselves, it dies, and whatever it had hoped or planned for us to do, whatever dark purpose moved this thing to break us from our deadly graves, that hope is dashed, that purpose is no more.”

The arrowhead was less than two yards from me. The bowstring creaked under the tension.

When Mneseus swung his arrow to cover me, I raised my rifle to my shoulder, but I did point it away from my previous target. I did not want to shoot from the hip a weapon that had so much kick.

132. The Blue Man

I had been very casual. When I had said my piece the Blue Man made tools from his fluid. But, when I turned my head and directed the conversation towards Kitimil, I had not turned my barrel away from the Blue Man.

Only after a moment of silence did the Blue Man look up to notice that I was pointing my barrel at him. He raised an eyebrow.

The man from AD 11,000 was as blue as a peacock’s neck, and highlights of purple, cyan, and jade shimmered through his skin substance when he moved. The Blue Man was reclining, leaning with one hand—chalk-blue on the palm, Prussian blue on the back of his hand—against his smooth plum-colored cheek.

His eyes were half-closed. In his other hand, he held a long-stemmed pipe of clay, like something a leprechaun would smoke, but in the bowl of the pipe was some luminous liquid that fluttered like a butterfly with wings of flame, and a weft of acrid smolder crept upward from the bowl.

He came from a dark age between the first and second eras of space flight, when mankind engaged in a thousand years of war with giant things living on the Moon, creatures once men, descended from exiled space-farers, who had grown strange and terrible during their generations-long voyaging to haunted worlds; beings who, in the weightless void, had grown enormous.

“Ah, me," he drawled in a voice of casual disdain. “And what might this poor son of Old Earth have done to lure the sniffs and blinks and pointy-fingers of our brave Boom-stick-shooter here? He is so proud of his chemical explosives, his surface-dimensional thinking, his pre-conflux cortex. I am merely an Adept of the Mind Core, a Ninth-Rank adept of the Excellent rating: whereas he extinguishes meaty beasts for sport, not to eat. What do I do to earn the honor of his suspicion?”

I said, “You will forgive me, sir, but you have complimented the enemy once too often to make your loyalty to mankind a matter safe to take for granted.”

Mneseus, who could not maintain the tension on his bow for so long, relaxed his grip, and lowered his bow: but he kept his eye on me, and kept the arrow ready on the string. Some of the tension went out of He-Sings-Death, but he kept his flint-tipped spear pointed toward Mneseus. Mneseus kept his eyes on me, and He-Sings-Death on Mneseus, but both men listened to what Crystals-of-Bliss was saying.

He was saying: “They are a more efficient form of organization, and even those that are not alive, they replicate, they spread, they consume. They thrive in this present environment, a dark cosmos where the stars have died, and all particles of matter start to fray. How long have they reigned? How many billions of years? A higher form than us, as we are higher than mere germs that make us sick.” He held up his powder-blue palm. “This bath-born son of Old Earth will cheer for the sickness called humanity, this time. Why not?”

“Sir," I said, “The turtle will outlive a man, as will a Redwood tree; the elephant is stronger, the tiger is more swift, and the lion more majestic. Nature arms us with but feeble tooth and claw; clothes us with hides fragile and naked to the cold and wet; equips us with a nose duller than a dog's, and an eye more night-blind than a cat's. The enemy is stronger than man, and wiser, and older: but so is the devil himself.”

“Devils, are they, then, you think? Is that the science of your awkward old-time age now speaking up, my poppet?”

I said, “With all due respect, I was more skeptical of claims about the afterlife before I was resurrected from the dead. If these are not black fiends from Hell, they'll do until the real ones come.”

The Blue Man said, “Ooh, that would be comforting, my pets, to know the universe cared about me and mine enough to hate us all! The cosmos is not alive: it is merely processes in motion. Stars do not twinkle to make us smile; runaway disease-mold does not eat worlds to make us cry. Smiles are a tug of muscles in the cheek: tears are salty water in the eye.”

The Blue Man was a smooth-shaven youth with the improbable name of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Version Seven. He had also been normal-looking before Abraxander had equipped us. Now his skin was dyed blue and hair on his head was a freakish chalk-white. The stubble on his cheeks had vanished, though I had not seen him shave.

(Neither, by the way, did Ydmos shave. Despite his silver hair, Ydmos was a strong young man, but no hair grew on his cheek. Enoch had black ringlets surrounding his full, red-lipped mouth, and he trimmed his beard into a rough square with his meat-cleaver, and he joked that the blade had no other good use.)

The Blue Man, back when he had been dusky and dark like a Spaniard, had asked Abraxander for flasks of bluish liquid that flowed sluggishly like molten glass. Only if you looked quite close, could you see the liquid was actually a mass of swarming midges, or mites; and even these mites you would see with your eye were fabrications, made out of the substances suspended in the gel by even smaller mites.

Unlike my rifle, which had taken three sleep-periods to solidify, his flasks had turned solid within an hour or two. The Blue Man drank the damn stuff, rubbed some of it in his hair, rolled it between his fingers like a child playing with fast-drying library paste.

He took it like snuff, wiped it into his eyes and ears, and, for all I know, rubbed it up his bunghole.

After that, his skin turned blue, and he grew himself a garment (if it can be called that), out of his skin cells. He shed his skin like a snake and then wrapped it back over himself as a skin-tight sheath.

Why shed you skin in the first place if you are just going to put it back on again? The garment was an oily material where he could make hues appear. Crystals-of-Bliss was smart enough to copy the camouflage idea from the armor of Ydmos, and kept his chameleon cloth turned to an unobtrusive dull pewter.

Many rows of tiny little pockets, looking almost like fishes scales, ran up and down the arms and legs and chest, giving a texture to the strange material, and here and there I saw a glint of wire or a bead of jet, and I wondered what they were. Ornamentation? I doubted it. I suspect his projection-tube was merely a toy: these electric circuits were his real weapons.

He said, “Is this, all this, merely Human versus Other? I suspect not. But say that this bath-born Ninth-rank Excellent is just as rah-rah, just as filled with patriot's delight, as our fine Captain Powell of Nantucket, unmodified baseline human, no-rank, born from a woman's womb like the beasts his age exterminated. But say it is so. Are you sure we should hate these creatures? Don't you know who they are?”

He looked around at us. He smiled a half-cocked smile and leaned back, taking and slow draw on his pipe, and letting the smolder waft from his grin. “This bath-born knows. Am I the only one whose brain matter matters?” He watched the plume of purple smoke trickle upwards toward the ceiling.

I said, “Forgive me, sir, but again you speak with admiration of the horrors who have annihilated all but eight of us. These things, whatever they are, these horrors are the enemy of all mankind….”

He laughed a bitter laugh. “What is man? Matter in motion. Meaningless atoms.” Then he pointed his pipe-stem at Abraxander. “Go ahead, gray-hair. Go ahead, you womb-born biomass. Tell them what you told me. You know where we are. Who built this place?”

133. The Matter-Wizard

Abraxander-the-Threshold dated from about AD 30,000, and came from the Earth-sized moon of a superjovian-sized world circling a double star in the constellation Cetus.

His people, at one time, had ruled the planet, but their atmosphere-equipment, over the generations, had failed, and the poisonous air native to the planet, the poisonous grasses and sea microbes, had returned. Of the hundreds of cities and domed villages of his world, only nine cities, in his time, remained.

Back when we had first emerged, wet and shaking from the rebirth coffins in the Archive, Abraxander seemed no stranger than any other man there. He had been naked, like us.

Of the million who fled the burning Archive chamber, I knew that only we survived, unless the other groups had had one like Abraxander among them. Our band had fled to what I took to be the Engineering Deck. While we waited, Abraxander said that the giant sarcophagi shapes looming along the back wall were “non-continuity” engines. He “sensed” that the oblongs still had a memory—he called it a “formation-ghost”—of the engine’s original ability to break through the walls of time and space. With that power, he made materials for us: arms, clothing, food.

He reminds me of my old headmaster at Bramingham: the same condescending, dry, infinitely patient tones. Not long ago, he tried very gamely to explain his art to me, which he insists is not magic (“The materialization is accomplished by polydimensional geometry: an axis rotates eidetic forms out of mind and into matter: the formality collects substance along the time-axis, so that to these ones, us, the process appears to take time…”) until I begged him to stop.

His own clothing reminded me of something between a Turk and a storybook wizard: his hat was a fez or a dunce-cap, he wore a puff-shouldered black jacket set with silver clasps, and a pair of pantaloons so balloon-legged that it looked like a lady’s riding habit, or a skirts of a Japanese fencers. His sleeves were so blousy and long that he had to tuck them into his sash. On his nose he wore a silver clasp set with pearls, as if a pair of pince-nez glasses had been shorn of their glass, leaving only the nosepiece.

His civilization had been the last period of three aeons of star-faring. His original home-era was so far in the future as to be unimaginable to me. And yet, even at that, it was less than one eight-hundredth of the time dividing my time from the home-era of Ydmos of the Last Redoubt.

He spoke in a slow and sad tone, as if his words came out against his will: “My people, us, we knew all life in the island-of-stars, the Milky Way, had been wiped out. Our paleo-xenologists sifted through the rubble, first of one world where evidence of life was found, then, centuries later (for the star-voyaging is slow) a second. My people, us, we found strange buildings, beautiful as seashells, on a lightweight world, but the skulls, fifty millions of them, a billion years old, had been placed in orbit around it. On the next world, a layer of radioactive crust, mixed with bone and blood, lay crushed beneath half a million years of sedimentation.

“Radioactivity, we found, a burned world. We thought, us, evidence of internal self-destructive wars. Not so. Weapons that split the atom and use the primordial energy of the universe itself did not prevail against the Slayers, but were able to deny them. You grasp?”

I did not, but Ydmos did. He said gravely: “They were Prepared, and they bit down on the Capsule. They burned themselves with Earth-Current, but they were not Destroyed. It has often been debated among us to do the same.”

I said, “I thought Earth-Current was geomagnetic force? Is it radioactivity?”

Ydmos shrugged. “It is the Earth-Current.”

Abraxander said. “It does not occur on all worlds, and human life cannot endure on worlds that do not have it: their children are less of human each generation, and delight in cruelty. It is a strong force on the Mother World: perhaps this is why the Slayers did not tarry during their first pass. But they had been here. Long ago, they burned the galaxy clean of life. And, looking backward into the past, deeper into the sky, we saw, us, that other galaxies we also dead.

“Do you know what a Seyfert galaxy is? The galactic core implodes in such a way as to produce a stream of deadly radiation, hundreds of light years long: a vent, or a jet. As the core collapses, the jet rotates. Any world in the main galactic plane of a spiral galaxy would be sterilized; in dense areas, novas would trigger novas, to burn any planets missed in the first sweep.

“My people, us, we thought Seyfert galaxies were a natural phenomenon. So foolish. Us, we thought the Hubble expansion that is draining the universe of useful energy was a natural phenomenon, too. And the neutron stars called black holes, which eat everything.

“In the sweep, they overlooked us. No one knows why. Mars, and the world that once was between Mars and Jupiter…”

Mneseus said, “We called that world Tartaros. It was haunted, even when broken. The ghosts of the void are dangerous to dream-travelers. No fully human has even returned sane from an astral journey beyond the region of the moon, except, perhaps, the dreamer Snireth-Ko.”

Kitimil muttered, “Kuranes. He goes further. He sees the Abyss.”

Abraxander continued: “The two worlds in Sol were destroyed. But not earth, except a glancing blow that extinguished the dinosaurs. Uranus was knocked sideways on his axis, and Pluto—but that world was discovered after your time Captain Powell, wasn’t it? A ninth planet. Originally it was a moon ripped from the planet Neptune.

“They overlooked the Earth and departed. Perhaps they overlooked another world in the universe as well: my ancestors, they heard radio signals, a mathematical code, issuing from a spot in the Lesser Cloud of Magellan. Instruments indicated a civilization advanced enough to use—these here, you do not know what a radio-pulsar is, do you? A star crushed and spun to produce a regular vibration. It can be held between two other dead stars, to make neutron waves–little parts of matter. Neutrons are little parts of matter of exceeding fineness, that fly, and can be blocked by nothing. Neutronic waves are an effect that has no counterpart in nature. We heard the signal, our ancestors.

“A ship was dispatched. What a ship! The greatest ever built. She was built at the height of the second aeon of star-farers, one aeon before my time.

“This one, me, I deem that the ship of which our records spoke, the fair, high ship, forgotten, in our day, save in the songs that children sang, is this one, her.

“Provisioned to run a billion years, fueled to last till the last proton decayed, five hundred miles from stem to stern, the brightest engine, the brightest star, greatest ship that flew far beyond far. Do you know the song? And done for a dream. Done, even though those who launched her knew their great-grandchildren would be dead before the destination was reached. This is the Spirit of Man.”

I said, “What happened?”

He shook his head. ”By the time the human race translated the mathematical code the creatures of Doradus S were sending, it was far, far too late to recall the ship.

“Their math told us a terrible secret. Our discovery was that if we turned our souls sideways in the dimensions between the time-flow and the mind-flow, we could bridge the gap between IS and MUST NOT BE. You see? It changed the nature and the dimensions of thought. The radio signals taught us the universal symbol set. It gave us the tools we needed to open the Utter Door.

“No one of my time, no criminal, no wicked tyrant, no mass-convocation, was dire enough to tempt the Utter Door. But the math was there. Once it was known, it could not be forgotten. The non-Euclidean arrangement of time, energy, eternity, mind, space, madness, dream, reality: the shapes had been discovered. The rotations of the nine-dimensional polyomnihedral chiliagons had been mapped out… we… something came backwards through the gap. Something from the far future, after the heat-death period, when time itself reverts to its primordial symmetry: the Eschaton, the point at which time is null. And the creatures that had swept this galaxy clean of life billions of years ago. The creatures of the far future and far past, the creatures of the outer darkness between the stars. They were the same, somehow.”

134. They Are Nothing Of Ours

The Blue Man said, “And so, my bravos, you have no notion of who they are, these cold faces hanging in the murk? Oho.”

Abraxander said, “They are the enemy, not merely of human life, but of all complex biological systems, everything that depends on sunlight for process, or exists embedded on one-directional time, three-extensional space. They are not of the ordered part of the universe.”

He-Sings-Death said, “They are monsters.”

Now the Blue Man laughed. “No, my dear comrades, we are the monsters. Us. They adapted to the conditions of outer space, outer darkness, and, when time ends, they adapt to conditions of non-time. So why not step backwards through time, make themselves, plant their own seeds, rewrite history to write themselves into the plot from the very beginning?”

Ydmos said, “An old heresy, and one that never dies. It is an illusion. Not all evil is of human making.”

I said to the Blue Man, “You are saying what? Those things out there? The statues with the staring eyes, the silent shadows wearing gauze, the black mist, the thing that laughed? The slugs, the trolls, Dry Tree, the Pallid Mask. They're us? Humans?”

The Blue Man said, “Changed by science to something no human would recognize, yes, my dolls, my dears, my poppets. Think! What else would our descendents be, but something we cannot recognize? What else would they do, once they broke open the wall of time?”

I said, “And would humans wipe out all life in the universe?”

The Blue Man smiled. “Why not wipe out all life in the great dark beyond? All other life, that is. All the competition. They did not overlook or forget about the Earth! They cleared the fields for her. Then they traveled backward in time to restart the universe with Man on top, right at the initial condition set. Why not?”

Mneseus said, “And so this horror, all this death, is not a horror at all, but a victory…? A triumph of the human spirit?”

Ydmos said sharply, “No human spirit has triumphed here, no matter how powerful the creature.” He turned to the Blue Man. “It is an old falsehood, one of the oldest. The Ulterior Ones are nothing like us. There is no remainder when a human soul is sorbed, consumed by the soul-eaters. It is not a communion; it does not draw the souls together. They are not our ancestors, nor our descendents, nor servants who rebelled, nor a punishment for some ancestral crime, nor something we unwisely stirred up by our overweening pride. Nor are they humans who adapted to the cold, though they do keep some maladapted human like that with them, as pets, to lend credence to the lie, and some of them have the art of mocking our looks and our voices. Do you understand? They are nothing of ours.”

The Blue Man shook his head. “It makes this son of Mother Earth happy to see that humanity will decay so far after me. Didn't you hear when Abraxander told us where and when we are? This is the end of time-space: all boundaries decay. At the Eschaton point all values fall to zero, as they were before the beginning. Time swallows its own tail. It all begins again. So why are we here, now, where the structure of the next universe is set to be decided, eh? When the barriers of time go down, we will be part of the timelessness, won't we?”

Ydmos said, “Beware your thoughts. You venture into the regions of the House of Silence. When mortal men think thoughts like unto theirs, the Silent Ones are not unaware.”

The Blue Man puffed his pipe again. “The event-conditions of the Timelessness, they cannot be so much harder to hack and reprogram than the doors on this ship. I can set the next universe up according to parameters. I got all the coffins open, didn't I? Once the ape-man there gave me the command key.” He nodded toward Kitimil.

I said, “Key?” Odd. How would an ape-man know how to unlock a complex machine of the future.

The Blue Man said, “Not so much different from the command keys I embedded in the bio-structural phages I used to clean up and fix up the Old Man's head. They have made nerve connections by now, and are open for signal-channel. You understand me?”

With a sinking feeling, I did. I said, “You poisoned Ydmos when he asked you to heal him.”

“Oh, more complicated, much and much, than that, birth-born.”

I said, “Sir, I do not mean to seem harsh, but I have yet to understand why I should not shoot you.”

Abraxander pointed at the Blue Man, saying, “Caution. That one, him, he claims injunction. That one claims the other one, Ydmos of Utter Tower, him, is enthralled. Ensorcelled.”

The Blue Man smiled a mocking smile. “The blue goo I put in the head of Ydmos; an open wound! How could I resist? I can send commands; my little mites will find the nerve ends and set his muscles jumping. Your little chemical-explosive propelled bullet will not penetrate his armor, and I can pull his limbs like a puppet to have you cut in two. The action-commands are on the trip: as soon as I am in pain or in shock or my brain-action is interrupted, the blocks open, and off he goes.”

Ydmos, for his part, smiled a bitter smile. “Perhaps, long ago, the Watching Things rejoiced to see men do their evil work for them. But such weakness is no longer in us. Men of my time cannot butcher each other.”

He did not say 'butcher', but used a word that meant to slay a monster. Evidently, there was no word in his language for killing men. I noticed that he said 'cannot' rather than 'do not' or 'should not'. He used the word-ending with an indicative rather than imperative voice, as if it were a statement of fact, not a question of moral judgment.

Abraxander-the-Threshold said to Crystals-of-Bliss, “Such a use of the polydimensional art will call upon that one, you, a counter-injunction. Certain rotations are possible to one who has done such a deed, which cannot be performed on an innocent man. The mathematical configuration is prepared. I repent that this one, me, must once again abuse the Art, and commit the gravest crime one of my order can commit. Human cellular action does not take place when the variables are rotated into the fourth dimension. The matter-energy balance of the original situation is established instead, without the negative energy spaces that allow for life. I will thrust you into a non-event condition: the trigger is your attempt to usurp the nerve-actions of that one, Ydmos of Utter Tower.”

Ydmos said to Abraxander sharply, “Do not! If you open the Door of the Country of Doors, what will Enter into this place and Condition Of Life is not meant for here. Our records do not reach back so far, but if the Opening of the Dark Way was prompted by the act of man doing deadly wrong to man, then, alas! I fear the suffering of our world is explicable.”

Abraxander said to Ydmos, “Yet that one, he, will slay you if I do not undo his work. I see the colors of time unraveling. These here, us, we are growing ever more near the place of placelessness, the time of Untime.”

Ydmos said curtly to Abraxander, “Death is nothing. He who fears it is enslaved by all who threaten him.”

Ydmos stepped in the middle of us, and spread his arms, trying to block my rifle and the arrow of Mneseus, the spear of He-Sings-Death. “It is not right that men should do wrong to each other! This is against the most ancient laws! Have we not foes enough, who watch forever for our downfall, and who are famished with a most terrible hunger?”

135. Spell-Caught

Enoch brought the heel of his wand down on the deck with a ringing noise. The noise was shockingly loud, especially when we had spent so many days creeping in silence away from the ears and eyes of motionless watchers. “Our hearts have been hardened, brother against brother. Who has done this thing? It is not an earthly power: who has send the whispers and lies into our spirits?”

Ydmos said to him: "You suspect an influence is clouding our judgment? It must be so. Impossible that men should threaten to wrong each other, and make another human to be Destroyed.” Again, his word for 'Destroyed' meant something only monsters could do to people, a physical and spiritual annihilation. There was no concept for murder among his people, no way to express it.

Enoch scowled, and his black beard made a deep parenthesis around his thick red lips, but I could tell he was suppressing a smile at Ydmos. “Perhaps it is not so impossible, perhaps not so rare, Last of the Sons of Man. But it is done by him, who escaped the Deluge.” He pointed his wand at Mneseus.

He-Sings-Death drew back his spear again. “Ah! As I said! He heeds the songs of the Dry Man, the bloodless and tearless man!”

Mneseus raised his bow again, and drew the string back to his jaw, but, again, I was the target, not He-Sings-Death, who threatened him. “Blind of eye! The beasts and dark hounds ran away when Pwyll made his iron stick to roar with that thunder that defeats the ears of men. He is spared when others are not: he was awake in the coffin-chamber before the rest of us!”

I said, “Master Kitimil was awake ere I was. Or, should I say 'Mister', since you are wed. Does everyone here have a mate, a wife, a queen or concubine? Is everyone here missing someone?”

After I spoke it, I realized what an odd question it was. Despite that, He-Sings-Death answered me: “Only him. He stole his father’s woman to be his wife.” He pointed with his jaw toward Enoch.

Enoch said, “Mneseus has spun a web: fury will turn spear against spear; blood will flow. But I, Enoch, Third from Man, with this word I end this web. The threads are broken.” And he raised his wand.

“No!” said Mneseus, “No, do not! The souls gathered here are too weak to take the noble path! Their hunger for the life will unman them: already false promises are being spoken. Do you not hear the voices? Do you not hear the lies?”

136. Third From Adam

Enoch waved his wand in the air. Nothing of any particular import seemed to happen, but he swayed, and a look of weariness came over him, as if he had finished some hard and heavy work. Enoch leaned with both hands on his bronze-tipped quarterstaff.

“Your song is ended, warlock. You thought to snare us, each to slay and be slain by another. But the Word which is given unto me is stronger than your song.”

Enoch was armed with a long and heavy stick shod with a lump of bronze at both ends. The sword in his sash was more a long knife than a real sword, and not a design I had ever seen before. The blade was roughly leaf-shaped, thick towards the tip, and curved, but backward from a scimitar. The inner curve was the business side of his blade: it was like a meat-cleaver. He had blunted it on the skull of an Abomination from Deck One Hundred Two, and never bothered to draw it again.

Five sleeps ago, when we had camped in the Museum, (our last peaceful night before the Black Mist swallowed two of the men on watch, Mr. Clockwork from AD 6000 and the ever-cheerful Huc-Huc Pounce from AD 4500, who I missed dearly), Enoch had spent an hour carving flowing letters into the wood with his blunted knife, and crooning to it in a harsh, glottal language. He said it was the language of the Angels, and he would not take any of the better weapons we looted from the turncoats and half-humans during the Pantry-Raid.

When I think of “angels”, I think of long-haired men in togas with wings and harps. He called them Kherubim, and terror shook his voice when he spoke of seeing them. Once, in his youth, he had seen one shining with fire in among the trees, rolling slowly on the business only God knew, and lighting played from its concentric rings of eyes. Somehow, I did not think he meant what I meant when I said the word ‘angel’.

According to his tale, merely seeing the angelic living creature had somehow granted him knowledge of their speech. Now he raised the staff and showed us the letters written there. It was a cursive script of unearthly beauty.

Mneseus threw his bow and arrow onto the deck with a curse. “May all memory of glory won in war be forgotten! Break, string, and shatter, staff! For you are proven too weak to do your master's will!” Then, to Enoch, the sorcerer-king intoned, “You have condemned us. Dead, we could serve no longer the purposes of those that woke us from the grave. Alive, how can we not? Alas! How did you overcome my spell?”

As he spoke, it occurred to me that it might not be the wisest thing in the world to shoot the Blue Man, much as I disliked him, considering that I, not he, might be the traitor, or alien influences might be tampering with my judgment, making me want to shoot.

I lowered my rifle and worked the bolt, so that there was no cartridge in the chamber.

He-Sings-Death saw me, and he slowly lowered his javelin.

The Blue Man, seeing this, made a little twitch of some expression I could not read, and reached and touched one of the many electronic circuits webbing his filmy coat. I presume that was something to tell the little machines he had smuggled into Ydmos to stand down.

Mneseus saw our weapons being set aside, and he grimaced with frustration, and he said to Enoch, “What are you, that can undo my daemon’s inspiration? How did you overcome me?”

“Everything that is named of Adam’s naming,” Enoch said, “Dominion is given to me, eldest son of his eldest son; for I had the words from my father, and he from his father before him, who is king of all men, eldest, and first: but the words of those things Adam did not name, the older things, sun, moon, stars, trees, waters, light, and the darkness that was before the Lord of the Elu on Oreb spoke His Word: over these things, the sons of Adam have no dominion. In life, I wrote the letters of this speech upon a column of brass and bronze, foreboding what was to come, and I built a city with a tower and a wall near the garden of my grandfather’s exile, by the shore of the river Pison. In times to come, and earthquake will bury these pillars, and an age will pass, and then other children of Adam will unearth and read them.”

He-Sings-Death was looking at Enoch in wonder. “I name you He-Speaks-Words! Use your words, you, to drive back the Dry Things and Cold Ones who follow us. Find for us the way out of this cave of iron to the warm places beneath the sun again!”

Enoch shook his head. “Even these words of the Elu will grant me no power over the Grigorim, the Watchers: for the Watchers came down from heaven, to watch the work of creation, but, (woe to mankind!) come to love the gardens of creation, and will not depart back to heaven when called. The sons of Elu take the daughters of women to them, yes, as many as they wish, and giants are born from them, mighty men of renown.

“The giants, the Nephilim, in time to come, one day rule the world, for their strength sweeps all before them. The One of Oreb shall be displeased. He shall open the windows of heaven. The world shall end in a great flood and the elder race of man shall perish. All this shall happen five generations from me, in the time of my grandson’s great-grandson, who is called Jubalcain the Harper. The Grigorim shall perish then but not before.

“It is as it is. No one, not the Elu and the Lord of all the Elu, no one can destroy the Grigorim without destroying the world.”

Kitimil barked at him: "Teach me your words!”

Enoch said disdainfully: "Those who were kings of the earth before Adam have no claim on the Words. You are no child of Adam: they are not for you.”

137. The Will To Kill Oneself

The Blue Man puffed on his pipe, and said thoughtfully, “So, Mneseus, were you monkeying with Captain Boom-boom's nervous system? Adjusting glandular levels, trigger parasympathetic responses, and work some such as that, and all to get him to blow his tubes of chemical explosives at me? Was there some point to that?”

I said, “With respect, Mr. Bliss, were you not paying attention? His Majesty was attempting to have us all join his suicide pact. If any of us live, it aids the enemy, or so he thinks. Knowing that some of us would be too weak, or too Christian, to slay ourselves, he used some sort of hypnosis or mentalism to urge us to kill each other. I suppose he was hoping the survivors would be those who held their lives lightly.”

Ydmos said, “Child of a happy age, it is not that lives are held too lightly, that we are willing to shed them, but that we dare not allow our lives to be Destroyed. What of man remains after his thoughts are eaten, and twisted, and taken into the dark of the silence-thought, that wounded remnant of him will make his voice will cry out, or what sounds like his voice, and his dreams wing across the Night Lands, making such promises as few ignore, tempting his loved ones to their deaths.”

“Sir,” I said, “I mean not to disparage your people, and I know not the dangers, spiritual and physical, they face: but surely self-destruction is the very definition of despair. That door opens to Hell, if you will forgive my saying so.”

Ydmos said, “Our science shows that souls are born again, for the aetheric currents outlast the fleshy vessels, and maintain themselves in standing waves in the magnetosphere of the planet: if they are Destroyed, there is no returning, not in all the thousands and tens of thousands of generations our records reach.”

Abraxander said, “The people of the Nine Pressurized Cities, us, we were taught that children must not be born aboard the space traveling vessels of which eldest legends spoke, and for such as reason as the men from the time of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss, them, those ones knew well, back in prehistory on the Man-home planet.”

Crystals-of-Bliss looked at him. “You recall our times, duckling? Good. That means we lived.”

Abraxander said, “Legends only. The Moon became the haunt of giants, for the children were born without humanity, and none of their coding was right. As for mental essences, our measurements show a partial formation ever present in the timelessness, which is why anticipation and memory, two non-time-specific functions, are addressed by the phenomena of the mental axis, and not by the physical. To restore whole person backwards from the essence, our savants held it to be possible, but no necromancer ever reduced the theory into practice.”

The Blue Man said, “’Tis but a gravity effect, my ducks. The moon-men were like us once, but meddled with their gene plasm so they could dwell in microgravity without bone decay. Of course they got big. So they lost marriage, and human emotion, and humor, and love, and so they do not blink their big eyes? Brain-chemicals gone wrong, that is all. Deep down, still from human stock, so the old records say. Nothing supernatural about it.” To me he said, “Self-shutdown, what you call suicide, puts you beyond all worry: there is no more you to worry. There is no punishment, no you to punish. And nothing gets saved from some sort of worse-than-death Destruct. There is nothing to save and no one to notice anything might have been. He says its courage to shutdown, you say not: but it neither can be or cannot be. A once-had-been cannot be a coward, not matter what he once was: he cannot be brave. If he be not at all, he cannot be this or that.”

He spread his blue hands and looked so very smug. He no doubt thought his skeptical belief in no one and nothing was the very pinnacle of wisdom, instead of its absence.

I said to the Blue Man, “When your loved ones die, do you tell yourself that they are merely meat? Do you say a dead daughter is made up of just as many atoms as a living one, and so therefore any distinction between them is an arbitrary preference?”

He was taken aback. His cynical mask for a moment had dropped. and I saw human grief, plain and clear, on his face. He said softly to himself, “Emerald Laughter.”

I blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

He did not answer me, for Ydmos then spoke up, saying, “Even among your people, Captain Powell of Nantucket, would you not condemn yourself to Hell, if it meant saving your loved one from being taken in your place to Hell?”

I had no answer for that question. My mother knew the Good Book backward and forward, and knew how riddles like that were answered: I had little use for Bible-learning, back when my world was alive. At that time, I was sure it was some trick made up by priests and hysterical women, to prevent strong men from running things to suit themselves. Now, I was not so sure. I had been a great admirer of pagan virtues, then, who honored strength and boldness, and who were not about to let the meek inherit the earth. Now I was a rat in the hold of a ship crewed by monstrous beings from beyond the cosmos, something out of all human reckoning. You see the virtues of strength and greatness differently, when you are the weak and the hunted, I guess.

“Forgive me, gentlemen,” I said, “But I am no theologian to puzzle out the implications of your lore and doctrines. The world is full of mysteries.”

I stopped, for I head a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words, but it sounded familiar.

138. Voices From The Aleph

Mneseus grit his teeth, and said in a voice of passion, “Children of my children, posterity, we cannot! We cannot live!” He looked back and forth among us. “Do no other of you hear the voice, tempting, pleading, saying they know all the secrets of the past and things-to-come? I know them: did I not once call them up to wreck the ships of enemies who dared the coasts of fair Atlantis? The sirens sing, and tempt, and call out in voices of the ones we lost.”

Ydmos said, “I hear them. Can you not pay them no heed?” But his face was troubled. I suppose, based on what he had said before, that those among his people who could hear the telepathic lures of the enemy, but could not resist them, had long ago been culled from the gene pool. Ydmos said, “The Watching Things can make shapes in thought that sound like our thoughts, but the Master-Word will silence them.”

Enoch looked at him. “What word is this? Is it Adam’s word?”

Ydmos said, “It is the ur-word upon which all human speech is based: it is the fundamental root of human essence. It is prior to language, and no human can misunderstand its import. The things of the Night Land can neither speak nor think it. This is one of many reasons why we know they are not of us.”

Mneseus held up his hand, “Listen to me, my children! Think! What other cause could these beings have, lamp-eyed children of Echidna, titans and Earth-born and all fashion of monstrous prodigies and ugly wonders, to hale us up from our graves? What we do that they cannot? What purpose serve? For, in the state, each craft has its craftsman; and in the parts of animals, so each part has its work. What is our part? What can we do, we humans, that these dark gods of the infernal realm cannot?”

139. What Do They Want?

The Blue Man said, “It hides not for naught. It hears us, aye: its watches us with a pale cool eye. What then? What for? For what? What do its codes tell it to do? Wants it us dead? Nothing to fear, in that. Dead, it cannot want us, for, if so, then why then this restart, this re-incarnal knowledge, life to-be-continued in Part Two? Why this?” He tapped his blue chest lightly with his pipe stem. “This sark, these bio-housing coats, fine and fair, firm flesh and pretty hair? Why bring us up from tape backup if it wants nor more than but to off us off again? Nor, deem I, this hidden one, would it crave aught he could by fear, or pain, or deconstitution of our brain, cell by cell, get for itself. What else? What else it to be?”

He-Sings-Death slapped himself on the thigh, and laughed and said, “Song! When the He-Calls-Day blows through the mouth of man, it is as a man who blows through a reed. (Make my song worthy, O He-Makes-Grass!) The good reed sings well, a cracked reed, badly. I have seen it, a cracked reed can be wrapped in wet doeskin leather, and the crack swell shut, and the flute made whole again. (Make me whole, oh He-Brings-Sun!) This, if could be, that the Smotherer is after, eh? The reed knows nothing of what he sings, till the song is breathed in him.”

Ydmos said, “We were not brought to sing. The enemy knows nothing of song.”

I said, “Then why?”

Ydmos said, “Bait. The strength of the House of Silence knows no limit. The Silent Ones would not need human men for something human men can do. Our living souls are but morsels of food to them, orts for their glut. But: something another can do, another who will come for us. But whom? No one will depart from the Last Redoubt to seek one who has fallen in the Night Lands. The Law forbids it.”

I said. “Bait for whom? For what? No one is coming. Everyone is dead. Even the sun and moon are gone so long ago, that the age of the dinosaurs was yesterday, compared to that. No one is coming.”

Ydmos said, “You are quick to doubt. Before the Lesser Redoubt fell, Naani thought no one was coming. She did not even know her lover had survived the death of the world of sunlight until she heard him calling her in a dream. Till then, the folk of the Lesser Redoubt thought they were the last of man: how could they have known a Greater Redoubt, destined to stand another ten million years longer, was in the Night Land south away?”

I said: “But our whole world, all the worlds, the galaxy, all the galaxies, all the stars, everything. I thought you said—“ I nodded toward Abraxander “—that the structure of space and time was breaking down. Reality and unreality are getting mixed. Time is ending.”

Abraxander said mildly: “Distinction. This one, me, I said the plenum elements were Disassembling. The process is an orderly backward infolding of the cosmogenesis, and return at low energy states of the original unbroken symmetries of fundamental concept-points. Does that one, he, grasp?”

Kitimil spoke. “Love.”

His voice seemed louder than before, almost a bark. We turned to look at him, but he was still staring at the round patch of light against the ceiling.

The Blue Man said, “Oho. The ape-man apes a man, oh, aye, he speaks his speech. I hear with my ear, yet I do not hear. Say your say, Kitimil!”

Kitimil the shaggy man cocked his head at a strange angle, looking almost like an owl twisting his head backward, and because his head was turned so far, it pulled his mouth askew, and made him squint, so he seemed to be sneering at the Blue Man. “Men do. Men do not know how to do. It comes. It is its own. It is done. Love.”

I said, “Why would they, the enemy, want us to love?”

Ydmos said, “What else will bring a man out from the Last Redoubt? For what else will he risk his soul to utter Destruction by the Forces that move in the Night?”

Kitimil said, “If it does not breathe, it cannot blow on the coal. If it does not love, it cannot mate; not mate, not bear. They need us to remake the All-of-all that is. We are their plant stalks. We are their seed corn. They hate love, but must have it now. They promise much; with both hands, they will give.” And he drew back his lips, and showed us the fangs of his grin.

And he scampered across the floor away from us, running on all fours.

140. The Last Of All Suns

Kitimil fled.

We all jumped up, startled. I don’t know what the others thought, but I brought my rifle to my shoulder and aimed at the retreated back of the shaggy man. But no: I could not shoot. What if Kitimil were running for some innocent reason? What if he knew who was traitor was and fled from him? (And, yes, the thought did not escape me that I might be the one, and some devil-thing inside me might be urging me to kill my comrade-in-arms.)

I lowered my barrel, grimacing.

And yet I remembered that he was the third mind reader in the group, aside from Mneseus and Ydmos. The siren song that Mneseus feared was audible to Kitimil.

He-Sings-Death, on his long legs, went ahead of us, his long spear held lightly on his shoulder, giving chase to the shaggy man. Mneseus rushed down the staircase aisle between the chairs toward the glass floor below, taking four and five steps at a stride, and his arrows clattered in his quiver on his back. These two were not quick enough, however, to catch up to the Kitimil, who leaped form seat back to seat back down the endless ranks of the amphitheater.

The Blue Man languidly lifted himself to his feet and sauntered at no great pace through the ranks and ranks of seats down the stairs of the amphitheater towards the acre-wide floor of glass where Kitimil, the Shaggy Man, was bounding. To keep an eye on the Blue Man, I followed; to keep an eye on me, Mneseus followed, and on him (I presume) Enoch followed.

Abraxander-the-Threshold and Ydmos stayed behind for a moment or two, talking in low tones. Eventually Ydmos took up his heavy wheel-axe weapon and came down the long stairs behind us. The slippered feet of Abraxander made a slight noise against the soft substance carpeting the stair; somehow, the heavy boots of Ydmos made none.

Kitimil, He-Sings-Death, and Mneseus were standing on the glass. Enoch would not step onto it, but leaned and peered.

Suddenly, all were still again. Kitimil was no longer fleeing; He-Sings-Death and Mneseus no longer pursued.

I called, “What do you see?”

He-Sings-Death looked down. There was reddish light from under his feet; it threw shadows across his shoulders, cheeks and forehead. I could see the whites of his eyes as he stared downward.

Enoch spoke first. “It is the hell fire. The pit where the Fallen Elohim burn. There seems to be a long black tunnel leading to it.”

He-Sings-Death said, “May He-Brings-Light reach out his hand and take me up, as I take up the boy-child I love, and the girl-child! Captain Powell of Nantucket: it is no tunnel, but the night sky. The sun is under our feet, and the sun is the color of blood from an old wound. The sun is wounded, for I see dark tears and scabs on his face. How can the sun be below my foot? It should be up in the sky, over our head. How can the sun be wounded? Sacred and bright, bright and sacred things are not to be wounded!” There was a tinge of hysteria in his voice.

I stepped down the last few stairs. The glass floor was less than a yard from me.

Something made me hesitate.

From behind me, Ydmos said, “We are in some Redoubt or Tower of the Silent Ones. This must be a shaft leading to a new source of Earth-Current. I sense that the light is holy: but how can the tower of the enemy stand here? The Earth-Current surely must destroy them: they cannot abide the radiance.”

The Blue Man cocked his head, and looked back toward Ydmos. “Sensed? What sensors, me dainties, what extra eyes, does the man from the sunless world hide? Sense how?”

Ydmos strode forward, and when he reached the glass floor, he bowed his head and knelt on one knee. Carefully he laid his weapon down, and he removed his left gauntlet.

He spoke: “My Diskos grows heavy in my hand; I feel the joy in the blade: that means her circuits are drinking of the stored ambient power. That means the power is the Earth-Current, which is hale and salubrious for the children of Man, and hurtful to the Watching Things, the abhumans and Night-Hounds.”

Reassured by his strange words, despite that I did not understand them, I stepped forward.

What a sight I saw!

It was a monstrous sun, and I saw what seemed to be swirls of light wreathing its equator like smoke. As my eyes adjusted to the sight, my mind adjusted to the magnitude, I realized that these wreaths of spiral smoke were hundreds, nay, thousands of spiral and cylindrical galaxies, whole clusters of galaxies, orbiting a sphere of incandescent fire like the rings around Saturn.

Larger than worlds, larger than anything, it was.

Even as I watched, I saw the innermost ring of galactic clusters fall down toward that light. The spiral galaxies spun like pinwheels, unraveling, and the countless millions of tiny specks, the stars, turned red as embers as they rushed into the flames of that immense, unthinkable central sphere of light.

As my eyes adapted, I saw as well that there were streamers of colored vapor wrapping the galaxies, much larger than the galaxies, spread like an aurora borealis throughout the immensity of space, and all the streams and filaments of dust were likewise rushing toward that all-devouring central sun.

There were bands of brighter and dimmer ruby-red painted across the immensity of the central sun, parallel to the equator of its huge rotation; black splotches like sunspots, crusts and dapples of darkness floating in the fire.

From the north and south poles of the vast red sphere of flame, two beams, white hot, like the beams of a search light, splashed upward and downward, igniting the surrounding clouds to cool peacock-tail-colored fire.

The light was as red as the petal of a rose, red as a cherry, and inexpressibly beautiful to my weary eyes. It did not burn me.

It was sunlight.

He-Sings-Death was staring at Ydmos curiously. He pointed at him. He-Sings-Death points by jutting out his jaw with a jerk of the head. “What does this mean? What he does?”

Ydmos had his left forearm held near his mouth. He was staring down into the light. There was a small round discoloration, as if a something were embedded underneath his flesh of his forearm. It was very near his mouth.

But then Ydmos lowered his hand and donned his gauntlet. “I am Prepared. I thought that if I were the one carrying the enemy inside, stepping into the light of the Earth-Current would make it show itself.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he had said, so calmly had he said it. He thought the light would reveal if he were contaminated. The thing buried in his arm was a lethal pill; a suicide device.

I said, “What is this thing? It looks like a sun, but no sun can be bigger than a galaxy, bigger than a million galaxies.”

The Blue Man stepped onto the glass and stared downward. His eyes evidently had his ghastly fluid in them, for the whites of his eyes turned blue, and so did his pupils, till he looked like a blind man. The blue pigment grew darker and darker, toward black, as the strange microscopic machines in his eye fluid drew in more and more light from the environment.

The Blue Man said, “A black hole, 'tis.”

Abraxander explained to me that a black hole was a body in space so massive that no even light could escape from its mass.

I said, “Why isn’t it black, then?”

The Blue Man said, “Ah, we are seeing surface turbulence only, me cuties. The surface area, it be not great enough to absorb the whole of everything, the universe, in one gulp; matter clashes against matter as it drains in, fearful symmetries are recompiled: types of particles, long forgotten ere the earliest universe, are being remembered and remade in yonder heat immense. The heat is caused by gravitational stress on the structure of timespace.”

Abraxander said gently, “That one, Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Seven, him, he speaks with less-than-perfect precision. Understand: the tidal stress on even very small particles is too great for the particles to retain, them, their internal cohesion. You know how myth says the Earth’s pull was greater on the to-ward side of the Luna as the fro-ward side? The difference flattened the orb, tide-locked her.”

“The moon always keeps one face toward Earth,” I said. “Kept, I guess.”

A sting of sorrow touched my heart. I remember Lisa looking up at the moon, that time we were on a boat near Spain, and the waves were silver in a shining path leading to the horizon. A blue moon.

She said a girl only would meet the man she was meant to meet once in a blue moon. She smiled at me. Now, there was no more moon. No moon ever again.

141. Entanglement

Abraxander was saying in his pedantic voice: “When, during the time of the Fifth Aeon, the moon came too nigh the Earth, she violated Roche’s limit, the satellite, her, she was pulled asunder by tides.”

For the moment I thought he was talking about a girl. By ‘she’ he meant Luna, the moon-goddess.

“At this phenomena, here–” Abraxander gestured toward the rose-red central sun. “The gravity gradient is steep enough, it, to pull small particles open. They suffer mathematical transformation into other particle combinations when that happens, still entangled with each other, though separated, them, by the event horizon.”

The Blue Man looked interested at that. “Science of my day, long-gone by-day, it would say that nothing reaches inside to outside of black hole. Only mass, spin, angular moment. Entanglements shown to be inter-operable? Our theory held all signal must be null: no information from in-to-out.”

Abraxander said carefully: “The entanglement involves not merely timespace and other metrics, but also symmetries of mind and not-mind, being and not-being. At the fundamental level, it is all one. This one, he who observes: that one, it is observed: both one. At these energy states, a particle endpoint is indistinguishable from its paired mate elsewhere in time and space. Monopolar, honestly: something that cannot exist alone, them. Entanglement allows for what, in our frame, seems backward in time. Eternity is entangled here, too.”

I said, “Entangled? Are you talking about, what? Atoms?”

He-Sings-Death slapped me on my back, and said: “Cannot exist alone! So it is with me and She-Speaks-Fair, most beautiful of all the band. Maybe Abraxander-the-Threshold, he means, they marry. She ties him in her hair. Very soft, not rope, the tie that ties the marriage pair. Her hair, one hair from her head, is used when we sing the marriage song. Thread of hair is so slender, man could break, if he wants; but good man, never he wants: so thread is strongest of all things. It is tied to his smallest finger here.” He gestured with his pinky, “To show the man how gentle he must be, how little is his strength to pick up love. It is not to be grabbed with the hand.”

I said, “Didn’t cavemen bonk women on their heads with clubs, and drag them by the hair to their caves? You seem quite the romantic, sir.”

He tilted his head at me. “Who of your people ever saw my people? Why would they say this unkind thing of us?”

I had no answer for that, so I said, “Tell me of your wife.”

“How I miss the hair of She-Speaks-Fair! Hear my cry, He-Steals-Fire, steal her out of the black water again for me! This time, I will not forget! This time, I will not look back!”

Mneseus muttered: “No, Abraxander is talking about contagion. Once touching, always touching. This is the alchemic furnace to burn the universe into being. The Central Fire men of earth can never see.”

Abraxander gently disagreed: “These are image-word these ones, you, speak, they are likenesses, and imprecise.” And he pointed underfoot, saying: "Observe. This place-event, here-now. Omega point affects an ever larger metric, it. Matter-energy falls towards. Entangled particle pairs are pulled away from each other by tidal forces. Energy is released. Liberated. That is what we see. The core of that body, him, is denser than all number can measure, darker than all mystery. This light is an illusion; a side effect.”

The Blue Man said persistently, “But you claim information can flow from inside to out? How can that be? Black hole swallows all, all but those parameters I said.”

Abraxander said, “Quantum uncertainty, in highly compacted frames of reference, becomes macroscopic. Information can go from there to here, if the positions of there and here are sufficiently undefined. All that is required is that the information density of the N space be greater inside than out. Thermodynamics will require the greater flows to the less, seeking equilibrium.

“How else was the universe created by the Big Band in the first place? All the mass of the universe concentrated at one spot, it could not have exploded, escaped to another spot, except that, at the same time, it unfolded both into time and space, to create the concept of "another spot". The unfolding was faster than the process of time itself, so that, at no point, was any particle traveling out of the creation gravity-well at faster than the speed of light. You see? It is an illusion.

“We, all the universe, are still within the event-horizon of the original black hole from which the universe came: the creation act was to force information in to the matrices of time and space, within the black hole itself. To observers inside, it must have seemed as if the universe began a sudden, inexplicable expansion. Hence, what we call the Hubble Error. Simpler to assume all matter-energy is shrinking, as it loses information value due to entropy, than to assume the edges of the universe are flying off from us.”

I said, “I thought we were seeing the destruction of the universe? What is this talk of the creation?”

Abraxander said, “It is the same. At the moment when all things become indistinguishable, the direction of the arrow of time becomes indistinguishable. At that moment, creation is destruction as seen from backward in time. As a book read back to front might be. However, before and after that moment, creation is the direction of decreasing entropy, and destruction the direction of increasing. Only at the Omega Point itself, does the observer see the symmetry.The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects"

I thought I would try a simpler question. I said, “Is it an old sun? Why else would it be red?”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. That speck falling in, look there—“ he pointed at one of the millions of stars streaming into the great central mass “He is a sun, him. Planets and cometary halos he pulls with him, the sun, as he falls in. This—“ he pointed at the central sun, “this is not a sun.”

“Why is it red?”

Abraxander said patiently, “It is not. The light seems red because that, the light, it suffers energy loss while it flies upwards against the pull. Light cannot be seen in any frame as moving more slowly; therefore the energy must seem to be lost in the wavelength: more red. It will seem white enough to these here, us, once we reach it, and join its frame of reference. To our eyes then, all will be white and clear.”

He-Sings-Death said in a shaking voice, “How can the sun be under my foot? Who buried the sun beneath this cave?”

I said, “We are not in a house, not in a cave. This is a ship: a sailing vessel that flies through the night sky.”

He-Sings-Death said, “And the sun is below the keel of the canoe?”

I said, “Not below. There is no below.”

He-Sings-Death plucked a bead from his hair and let it fall, clattering at his feet. He pointed at the bead with his chin. “Ah! Look! Tricky little bead, fools me, fools my eye. Bead thinks there is a below. That way. The way it fell. Poor bead!”

I said, “Let me explain. The ship is a cylinder. Because it is spinning, it seems to make weight….well, not weight exactly, but acceleration. No, wait, there must be a way to explain this. Hm. OK. Suppose you took a bucket with water in it and swung it around your head very fast on a rope. See? The water would stay in the bucket.”

He-Sings-Death looked skeptical. “Captain Powell of Nantucket, why should I take a bucket with water in it and swing it around my head very fast on a rope? I am the eldest of ten brothers, and my voice is heard in the wisdom-tent, and even the gray-haired elders listen to my songs. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

“Um…. Okay.” I turned to Abraxander: “I get the impression I am not going to understand your explanation any more than Mr. Singer here understood mine, but let me ask: How do you know the ship is moving? You said we were going to enter the frame of something of the sun.”

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun, that. It is the Omega Point. Once this point, that, it achieves condition mathematically indistinguishable from the Alpha Point, all time will reinterpret. Whether the next universe will be as this one, or some other condition, no one can know who is inside the context of time.”

“What do you mean, reinterpret?”

Abraxander said, “Reevaluate.”

“What?”

“Time will reevaluate itself, will re-impose upon itself the values of meaningful events. You know the difference between meaningful and meaningless?”

“I thought I did.” (But, listening to him, now I was not so sure.)

“Time, it is an orderly sequence of non-energy, what is the word? Intervals. Every interval of meaning must have negative non-meaning to define and separate it. Words must have silence; pictures must have white between the black. Ultimately, meaning must mean what it means against a background of non-meaning. Hence, time is a self-evaluating structure. Time gives meaning to time: do you follow me? A thing gives value to a thing by evaluation. This is why life exists only within time-ness, because life must consist of processes bound by birth and death, which are the boundary conditions. Wait. There must be a way to explain. Imagine you are in an infinite but boundaried spacetime of N dimensions. The condition is spherical in N plus Two dimensions. Within your light-cone, of all possible futures, if you have meaning now, they will have meaning then. However, outside your light-cone, in order for the N space itself to have meaning, there must be an imaginary set of points which do not have a past-to-future relationship with any point inside your light-cone. Now suppose (which is impossible in undistorted space) you are rotated to the imaginary points: they would seem like end points at that time, and could be either past or future, depending on the collapse of the uncertainty wave-function.”

I said, “Abraxander-the-Threshold of Tau Ceti, why should I be rotated to these imaginary points outside my lighthouse? I come from a respectable family. This would not be a good thing for me to do: little children would laugh.”

Abraxander opened his mouth to continue his explanation, but then there was a twinkle in his eye, for he took my meaning, and he nodded.

I asked, “Maybe this would be simpler. How do you know that the ship is moving? There is no sensation of motion.”

Abraxander pointed underfoot. “See where the stars stream like dust-motes, them. There is a spiral galaxy unwinding in a few, to us, seconds, all her scattered stars dropping into the central vortex of the Omega Point like raindrops. Calculate the mass involved in even a medium-sized star crossing that degree of arc. Surely it is obvious!”

I said, “Not obvious to me.”

The Blue Man turned and said to me: “Too fast. No galaxy, nothing that size could discombobulate so fast. It took place a million years ago, and took a million years. This ship is crowding lightspeed. Imagine a concentric of light expanding, bing! Bing! Many concentrics. Bing! Bing! Bing!”

I said, “Stop binging at me.”

He said, “Imagine them binging off from the sight, one bing per ten thousand years. We puncture a ten bings of concentric in ten seconds of flight. To us on board, film is fast forward. It looks like it takes a moment or two. Ten seconds. Station time in frame of galaxy, ten thousand times ten years. Get it?”

I said, “No. Forgive me, Mr. Bliss, but I think the spell Nergal cast, or Ydmos, or whatever that hypnotic thing was, might be wearing off.”

Of all people, it was Kitimil who touched my knee and said, “A runner leaves the cave when Uj is born, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is born! He runs east. Second runner leaves the cave when Uj is young man in fullness of his strength, proud as a bull, hateful as a serpent, and he says, weep, all the earth, for Uj is strong, his spear drinks blood, and Uj lifts up his hand in strength! He runs east. Third runner leaves the cave when Uj is dead, and he says, rejoice, all the earth, for Uj sleeps in the ash of the pyre, and his spear sleeps at his side, and slays no more, forever. He runs east.

“A bird who is as swift as the ray of the sun leaves the land of Behind-the-Dawn, and flies from east to west, for all gods run east to west, sun and moon and star. She hears the first runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the second runner. She flaps her wing. She hears the third runner. She lands on the bulbul tree, and says, Oh! Who was this Uj that all men forever feared would be born! Uj was not so to be feared! He lived and died all within three beats of my wings of fire. Foolish men! So she says. The gods are too swift to know our fears. This shell you say is a canoe is as that bird.”

He meant the ship. The ship was moving so quickly it was overtaking the messages, the light, carrying to our eyes the images of a destruction that, as best I could tell, had already happened.

I was staring at Kitimil in astonishment. This savage was apparently able to grasp with ease something that still seemed locked in a riddle to me.

I said, “Who is Uj?”

Kitimil waved his hand above him and below, indicating the vast black ship entrapping us. In his language of grunting clicks he spoke: "Uj clings to the canoe of Neomah and Noah, his hands cling to the bark, and he carries the snake in his belly, the scorpion, the toad. Noah was to drown all poison beasts, but Uj saves them, so that Noah’s sons know pain. He does this for the not-people. He weeps. But the not-people took Magigi from him. They give her back soon.”

“Are you talking about Enoch’s giants? The Nephilim? Or is not-people your word for these devils?”

Kitimil looked at me with pity, and shook his head, and would not answer.

Ydmos said, “We learned, much to our sorrow, that it is unwise to give names to the things in the Night Land, for then they appear in our thoughts as more human than they are. It is our custom, even among ourselves, to refer to the enemy only by attributes. There is a danger otherwise.”

Enoch spoke, “For the good powers of the world, as well as for the ill. It is not right for man to make in brass or iron any image of the Lord of the Eloi, for it is idolatry, and men come to praise the works of their hand, and not Him whose handiwork Man is.”

Ydmos bowed toward Enoch, as if toward a sage.

Then, to me, responding to an earlier comment of mine, Ydmos said, “If the conjunction made with Nergal the Hunter fails, I cannot reconnect it.”

“How does it work? Who or what is doing the translating for us?”

Ydmos said, “The science of aetheric pnumatics is largely forgotten in my time. The speculations of unwise men breached the walls of time, and opened doors that should have been kept shut. I did perform a conjunction: but I also sensed a unification of energies centered in Nergal the Hunter. His spiritual condition was bifurcated, as if the Night-hearing had once been his, and then had been taken from him. His past self, it enjoyed singularity of language: I brought it forward, for it was connected to the ur-word, which I know.”

I said, “ 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.’ “

Enoch looked at me, a look of fear and wonder on his face. He said, “As if I hear a trumpet: there is one who stands behind Captain Powell and speaks words of power through him!”

I said, “It is a quote from the Old Testament. About the confusion of tongues.”

He-Sings-Death whispered to me, “Why does he hear voices? Who speaks to him that does not speak to us?” He pointed at Enoch with his chin.

I said to Enoch, “What are you hearing? Whom did you hear, when I spoke?”

I saw the look of fear and guilt on his face.

He-Sings-Death raised his spear toward Enoch. “He is the one. The darkness is in him like a serpent.”

I said, “What? How do you know?”

Enoch was backing away, and raised his wand.

He-Sings-Death said, “Does he weep? Why did he pull the tongue from the spell Mneseus wove?”

I said, “So that we might live. Mneseus would have had us kill each other.”

He-Sings-Death grinned a savage little grin. “Live? For what? Who else wanted us to live? Who woke us from death?”

Mneseus said, “There is no more time for speech. Now it begins.”

I said, “What? What begins?”

142. The Dawn Of Souls

Crystals-of-Bliss said to Abraxander: "Are we entering the event horizon, poppet?”

Abraxander looked at him with a slight smile, and said, “These ones, us, we will encounter no barrier, no wall. Does this one, you, does he know what an event horizon looks like? It is not like smashing through a pane of ice. It is passing an imaginary point beyond which the calculated escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.”

The reddish sunlight underfoot grew more yellow as he spoke.

I forgot Enoch. I looked down.

He-Sings-Death said, “Praise the Dawn, and the coming of the Dawn, and praise as well He-Brings-Dawn, for what should men who walk on Earth, what should we do, if the Bringer should fail to bring some day? A baby cannot find milk without his mother: no more can men who walk on Earth find light, if the light-bringer does not bring light.”

I said, “It is not dawn. We are dropping into the Central Sun. Look! Where have the other galaxies gone?” For the wide belt of streaming galaxies, pinwheels and spirals and nebulae of all sizes, vanished before we passed through it. Here and there were scattered stars, stars without Milky Ways around them, and some clouds of thin gas, green and blue and indigo, luminous with the light behind them.

Even those last few suns were dropping toward the Central Sun, like droplets of fire falling into an ocean of fire.

The circle of the central sun grew larger and larger underfoot. Around the rim of that blazing disk, the black sky of the empty universe was beginning to glow cherry-red, as if the whole cosmos were some enormous oven.

Abraxander said, “It is not a sun. It is not the dawn. The hue of light is higher in its frequency, because this ship here, her speed is greater.” And then to Crystals-of-Bliss, he said sardonically, “Can you not see the color of the sky beyond and around the Omega Point?”

Crystals-of-Bliss said, “So we are already beyond the point of no return.” His nonchalance, for once, had vanished: he looked frightened.

I said to him, “Mr. Bliss, why does the prospect frighten you? If understood Mr. Threshold's explanation, the space and time itself outside the event horizon are also being pulled in.”

“That should cheer this Son of Old Earth, you unregistered chance-birth? Not only can we not get out, but there is no place to go. It is impossible to depart this place, impossible to surpass the speed of light.”

I said, “Impossible? Sir, forgive me, but, for a man who has been revived from the dead, you seem to have a very certain knowledge of what can and cannot be done.”

He-Sings-Death said, “Why is the sky afire?”

Abraxander said, “We are in a pit, us, this ship, all of us. The light is outside the pit and falling inward, onto our heads. The pull of the Omega Point speeds up the light as it falls on us, but light cannot speed up, and so it must grow more energetic, more short-waved, as it falls. Normally, this light is too dark to see, a mere degree or so above absolute zero. But now, the universe is so small in diameter, that light from the Omega Point is departing and re-entering, even as a ship might sail east until the comes back west. That redness is the image of this place where we are now, but the light has traveled in a great circle. That is the light from the outside universe, falling down into the black hole with us. As the wavelength is compressed into visibility from infra-red, to us it seems red.”

The light underfoot grew brighter, and, all at once, the disk of the Central Sun swelled up and filled the view embraced by the table of glass where we stood. At the same time, the fires parted like mists. Even as mountain climbers make their way up through a low hanging cloud, but do not see the cloud, only a mist that receded from them, so too was it with us and the fires of the Central Sun. I bent down and touched the glass, but felt no heat from the surface.

143. The Sea Of Sleep

“Look,” I said. “Bubbles. There are streams of fiery bubbles within the fire. Some sort of spray or…"

Ydmos said, “These streams are surely the Earth-Current: there is in them something salubrious to this, our condition of life.”

He-Sings-Death threw himself on his face, and pressed his cheek against the glass, squinting. “I see a tall tree. There! In one of the bubbles. A winter tree, for it has no leaf.”

Ydmos said, “It is a tower.”

Crystals-of-Bliss said, “No, my luckies, it is a ship. The Moon-ships of the Giants are great cylinders like this. An enemy. Or….” He glanced at Ydmos. “Or someone, beyond all hope, a-come now to rescue us?”

Abraxander said, “The Spirit of Man.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “That, there, it is a reflection. You are seeing this vessel from the outside. The 'bubble' is a place where space-time forms a standing wave, a node. Light is bent by gravity and returns back whence it came. This is our own image, sent back to us because the space is more badly bent there than around it. Look at the other bubbles. They are nodes as well. If the curvature is positive, a sphere, it will show the surrounding space, and contain all within it: if negative, a saddle, it opens up into something beyond the range of our light-cone, beyond what can be known or seen.”

He-Sings-Death jumped to his feet. “I saw a face! A drowned man! In the bubbles!” He pointed with his spear left and right. “Many faces! Look!”

Abraxander said, “Formation ghosts. Biological formations, in this case. These ones, we should be able to evoke more complex formations, depending on the initial energy of our imposed rotation. Worlds. Stars. Everything. However, the only available source of power is from the discontinuity engines of this vessel, which are entangled to the creatures who resurrected us.”

I said, “What are those bubbles? Windows into heaven?” For I saw faces, too. Faces of men and women, eyes closed in blissful sleep.

I was overcome with terror, for I was sure that, at any moment, the face of Lisa would float past the window. I cannot say why it was fear, not joy, that griped my heart at the thought, but I was shaking.

Abraxander said "No. This is an Aleph. It contains the memory of the universe.”

Enoch said, “The elect are mixed here with the damned. Do not look into the dark bubbles. The faces are torn with pain, their mouths wide with screams they cannot utter, their eyes staring and blind. Do not look! It is not right that mortal men, who know but finite times of suffering, should look into the eyes of those who suffer without end.”

He-Sings-Death looked down. He gave cry of awe and pointed with his spear down below his feet at something I could not see, “All the faces, white and dark alike, sleeping and suffering, are being pulled there, toward that greater light. There is a face within it greater than all others.”

Mneseus took my elbow. “Captain Powell. Yours is the mightiest weapon here. Slay us all, and kill yourself.”

I shook him from me. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but why should—"

His eyes were flashing. “There was much in the tale of Abraxander-the-Threshold I did not know, and his words passed my ear, and no seed of understanding was planted in my heart. But this one seed was planted, took root, sprouted: in his tale, how did his people learn his art? The practice by which he conjured your iron thunder-spear, my bow, the bone club of the Gaea-born Kitimil?”

I said, “From a radio broadcast from another galaxy…" but I stopped, for I knew he could not imagine a second Milky Way (which, to him, was a road of stars stretched over the dome of the night sky) any more than he could believe in a second sun.

But he said, “To which this great ship—this hall you call it a ship—was sent. But it was a trap. He said this, in his tale. From whence did that art first come? The dark geometry he speaks of, that allows man to open doors between the heaven, earth, and hell, doors the gods abhor that men should open.”

“From them. From the enemy.”

“Do you think they taught him this art, and brought him back from the dead, to be in this place with us now, him and his dark arts, for some purpose that will bring men joy?”

The Blue Man was standing a little ways away from us, and now he raised his hand and spoke loudly, “Radio signals! I am intercepting a message, my bravos. Or—not intercepting—the mind, the mind inside the black hole. It is talking to me. She. It is Emerald-Laughter-of-Refulgent-Leaf.”

“Who?” I asked him.

Absent-mindedly (for he was listening to some voice inaudible to me, and his face was numb with wonder), he whispered. “She…. Was…. My daughter-wife. Made of my own tissues. We are genetically interlocked, chemically addicted to each other. Sterile with any other partners… we….”

Ydmos said, “Do not heed the voice, lest your draw her in, and feed your true love to the enemy.”

Mneseus said, “It is a siren. We will not be able to resist.”

The Blue Man said, “She is coming aboard.”

Kitimil was crouching on the glass floor, staring hungrily at the streams of light flowing past, at the thousands of shining bubbles caught in the light. He threw back his head and uttered a wolflike howl of triumph.

As if by instinct, I raised my rifle and took aim at him.

His face was now dark with wrath and triumph, as if uncounted years of carefully hidden anger now could no longer be suppressed. His hair and beard were bristling, and his lips were drawn back to show his fangs. His eyes were but slits in his dark face.

“Humans, how you forget! Between lives, we do not forget, the First People. When the Darkness fell down from the stars, it pleased the Silent Ones that you should be hunted from life to life, and wake without knowledge after every death. The First People did not please the Silent Ones: we were slain, cub and mother, young and old, and our sacred trees were torn up by the roots, our shades could not climb the branches to the sky. I, and I alone, escaped them, for it amused them to permit me to escape: for the world is a trap, all the world, and I had nowhere to run but here, and nothing to do but this. Now it all begins again.”

Because of the hypnosis or the magic Ydmos and Nergal had performed, I knew that by 'First People' he meant the race I knew as Neanderthals.

Abraxander said, “That one, Kitimil is performing a rotation. That one, he knows the same art as this one, me, but his reach is greater. The fourth-dimensional radius of his major axis embraces this entire area of space-time.”

I said to Kitimil, “Tell me what is going on! Tell me, sir, I warn you, or I shoot!”

He sneered at me. “You knew once, but you forgot.”

I blinked. Even though he was but a scant five yards from me, my vision was swimming, and I had trouble keeping him in my sites. The air between us was rippling.

I said, “We … we have met before …"

Kitimil said, “In other lives, all of you, over and over again. You forget, and I remember.”

Mneseus said to me, “Slay him. Surely he is the traitor we fear.”

I said to Ydmos, “What should I do?”

Ydmos said, “Do not wrong your fellow man, or it calls the Thoughts from the House of Silence, whose doors have never closed in all eternity.”

Mneseus said, “He is not a man; he is an earth-born.”

Kitimil grimaced and gave a chuckle. “Ask him, the archer, why he does not slay me himself? Why does he urge you to do the act?”

Enoch raised his wand and pointed it at Kitimil, “Silence! We agreed not to tell him.”

144. I Am Alone

That made me lower my rifle. I blinked and looked around at the others. They were all wavering now, as light from underfoot was surging into the chamber. There was a pressure behind my eyes, like drunkenness, and my vision was blurred. “Tell me what?”

He-Sings-Death said, “Captain Powell is my friend. I will speak: Powell! We are all ghosts. Not you. That is why you were spared.”

I said, “What does that mean?” And I was surprised to hear the words come from my mouth in a voice that was thick and shaking with fear.

Abraxander tucked his hands into his sleeves like a mandarin. “The self versus non-self distinction is breaking down. We are entering a period of the universe where there is no more this one and that one. Look at my lips. I am not speaking. You are recalling my thoughts as if they are yours because we are all becoming one.”

Enoch pointed overhead, “Look. There is light below our feet, but we do not cast shadows. You cast a shadow. This is not flesh, our substance. You dreamt us into flesh, even as you dreamt the weapon you carry.”

I said, “Abraxander did that!”

Abraxander said, “Abraxander is but one of your reincarnations. During his life, Illsa Flosshild von Maarchen was reincarnated as Nimgwendoline-the-White-Link, and had been, tragically, wed to another, for you had not the patience to await the coming of your true love, promised from previous aeons, to reappear, and did not recognize her, but delivered her to your liege lord, Arthrobel-the-Circle-of-Stars, who was the potentate for the Third City of the Nine.”

I said, “Her name was Illsa Powell. Von Maarchen is her maiden name. Everyone calls her Lisa.”

He-Sings-Death, “When you were He-Sings-Death, she was She-Speaks-Fair, but she was bitten by a viper on your wedding night, but during the moment when she screamed and jumped in your arms, you thought, you thought she screamed because of the pleasure of you. In the sweat lodge, you walked in a vision to the Dry Place, where the shadows of the dead are kept, and He-Is-Rich, who rules the tribes of the dead, granted you leave to bring her up to the world again; but he did this to mock you, for a shadow cannot step into the sunlight.”

Ydmos said, “The dead did not mock you. She did come again, and you met her again, and fell in love, and were wed. Her name was Ulliona of East bastion, daughter of Psymmachus the Librarian. I returned from a venture into the Night Land, but I carried a mind-sickness into the Last Redoubt from the unclean things that dwell in the Place of the Thing That Nods, and my thoughts were tainted with extradimensional infusions. In a fit of madness I slew her and my children: when I was brought to my senses again, the Lectors asked me to bite the Capsule, and slay myself, for despite that I had entered the Last Redoubt again, I carried the Night Land within me, and the harsh rules of that outer world applied to me.”

Mneseus said, “She was Parthenope, Sorcerer-Queen of Ys, the seaport of the Land of Atlas. Of her you know, and she perished. When the waves in anger drowned our shining cities, her tomb was sunk also: but she was turned into a sea-mew by the gods, and rose again from the salt waves, and in my ship, I and my few men, we followed her white wings over trackless deeps to Aegyptian Lands, and I told the secrets of my lost peoples to the Pharoahs.”

Enoch raised his wand in both hands, and brought it down across his knee, to break it in two halves. He sent the broken fragments of stick clattering across the glass floor. “I am the traitor. I am the one who cannot say the Master-Word that Ydmos knows.”

I said “I thought you were Enoch the prophet, a holy man?”

“I am Enoch, son of Caine. I stole my mother, Lillith, from my murderous father, and made her my wife. I gathered my people inside the first wall of the first city, and Caine and his other sons gathered about. Caine called up the Grigorim, the Watchers sent from heaven to see the work of creation, but who lusted for the world and forgot their home. These fallen beings, these Watchers, encamped without my walls. Thus began the first of sieges of the first redoubt of man. As with the final siege from Ydmos’ time, treason from within betrayed the redoubt. They offered me a human woman, and life eternal, that she and I should meet and know love, true love, not merely once, but in life after life. The serpent you all feared, the darkness, is carried within me: but my memories are within you. We are entangled. We are one.”

Kitimil's teeth were clenched as he crouched on the glass floor, staring up at me, but he grinned like a skull. “Where is Magigi? Your woman has come again to you, not once, but many times. Why not mine?”

I looked up. There were two shadows on the ceiling. Mine, and the shadow of the Neanderthal. Kitimil was real.

When I brought my eyes down from the ceiling, Ydmos, Abraxander, Mneseus, Sings-Death and Enoch were gone. They had faded away.

145. The Last Of The First Folk

I said, “You opened the coffins in the archive, to create the distraction, and you sent Nergal to fight the overseer.”

He said, “I opened but one coffin: your own. You produced the rest, all the millions of men, from your mind, because the solitude had driven you mad.”

“Do you mean I hallucinated them, or do you mean I rotated them into flesh using Abraxander’s dimensional mind-science?”

“What does it matter, after-man? Even now, does sanity matter to you?”

“Your voice has changed,” I said, “Your way of speech. What language is this? Who are you?”

“You know me. I follow you through all your changes from life to life, so that I may be with you at the end of all.”

“So you came here. You stirred up the rebellion in the Archive to free me. None of the other men, only me?”

“Fool. There was no rebellion, no giants to fight. Those lesser servants of the darkness were long ago consumed by the greater servants. We have run, you and I, down empty corridors of a dark, deserted ship, for weeks, and months, and years, and decades, with no one and nothing in pursuit. I watched while you fought battles with invisible foes, wept over imaginary comrades fallen in battle, and fired pretended weapons at fictional monsters.”

I straightened up. In a voice of relief, I said, “Then, if I am merely mad, and those nightmares merely from my own mind … Thank God!”

“The hounds and Mantichores are imaginary, the behemoths, the giants and the Great Gray Hag. But—“

“No.”

“But the Silent Ones are real. The Watchers are waiting on every deck of this vast ship, and watching you, the last of all the sons of Man.”

“Not the last. Mr. Singer, Mr. Bliss, Ydmos, and the others—“

“Shadows of you. I don’t know why you conjured them. Perhaps you meant them to argue your decisions for you: the faithful and the faithless, the wise and the impulsive, the noble and the humble. As Mneseus, you tried to convince yourself to kill yourself; as Enoch, you prevented it.”

“No. Surely, I am merely hallucinating all this …"

“Until today. Your imaginary weapon went off. I heard the report. I saw the bullet hole appear in the far bulkhead. I smelled the smoke, and heard the spent shellcase tinkle on the deck. I know, after centuries of following you from life to life, the time to consummate our agreement had come: and so I brought you here, where you were allowed to view the Last of All Suns, where all the ghosts of all the dead worlds of creation are gathered to their cremation. Now the ghosts will board the ship, attracted by your affections.”

“Agreement?”

“I am eldest. Death is not amnesia to one of my race, nor do we forget our dreams on waking. You need my memory to recreate the world, for the things you know will not return out of the mists of time, unless things older than you know are called before them: you must have the roots before you have branch and twig and leaf. My part is done: I have brought the world I remember within hailing distance. Now it calls to you.”

Unthinkingly, I put my hand down to pet the dog I found at my side. His fur was long and golden, and with a rough tongue, he licked my hand. “Pepper?” I asked in confusion.

Pepper barked and wagged his tail.

Then he sniffed the Neanderthal, and he growled, and hunkered down.

I said, “Did they promise you your mate again, if you betrayed us?”

He shook his shaggy head slowly. “Not me. You. You are the one who made the promise to them, long ago, in another life. You are the one who carries the coal from which the new universe is meant to catch fire. I am merely here to breathe on the coal.”

I said, “What coal?”

He said, “Love.”

“Love?”

He snorted at my ignorance. “Fool! Of what else could a universe be made?”

I said, “Why do they want a new universe made? These monsters? What do they want?”

“They want to eat it again.”

“Am I going to make the universe, all by myself? I am no god.”

“You are a dove Noah sends out. They want to find the new universe.”

I had to laugh. “The universe is a pretty big place. How can they miss it?”

He said, “At the moment, the cosmos is sub-microscopic, smaller than the diameter of the core of an atom. Somewhere in here, in the Central Sun. The cosmos is yet a seed. If they find it after it starts to grow, too late for them to enter. You will lead them to it. They cannot find it without you, without human life.”

“You won’t do? You are alive.”

“I am Noah’s raven. I was sent and failed.”

“Failed why?”

“I remember the horror from life to life. I know how many other men will see their mates soul-eaten and destroyed, so that I may have a few brief days with mine. I must learn to be cold in my heart when other men suffer, or else I go insane. So I care nothing for the world; I hate it. But you forget your lives. You still love your woman, and your fellow man, and the world. The chains are connected, one to the next. They pull on the first chain, they get the woman, her folk, their folk, and all the world.”

I said, “Suppose I do find this new universe, smaller than an atom. Why would I tell them? And how could I even see it?”

He shook his head, but drew back his teeth, a grimace of assumed contempt, as if I had said something childish, unutterably foolish. But he did not answer.

I asked again: “And what if I defy them? What if I simply say no?”

“The worm needs do nothing on the hook but twist.” He pointed at my hand. “Look to this weapon. You were merely fond of it, familiar with it. It is nothing. Your woman, your people, those you love. They are everything. The sun and moon and stars. The wilderness, the sea. The House of Silence found a man like you, a wanderer, who would know many lands and love them. That love, by itself, will seek the place where all these things can be made again, even as a magnet seeks a magnet. They would not let me tell you anything that could hinder their terrible purposes.”

“Do you speak to them?”

“No. I hear whispers in the night, in my soul, and I guess at their desires. But I still live, as do you. They spare me. If not for this, than what? We are within the last few breaths of time, and short breaths, too: the cosmos has less than a moment left. I can sense the Omega Point is near. Look outside! The bubbles, the faces, the ghosts: all is gathered into one pinpoint of infinite light. In a moment, the light will vanish, as all reality eats itself.”

The golden light winked out, but there was still a dull reddish glow, like the glow from a iron forge, filling the last few cubic miles of the shrinking universe.

“What are those dark walls I see? They are above and below and all around.”

“The hull of this ship.”

Underfoot, through the porthole where I stood, I saw what I assumed was the dark skin of another ship, but as if that ship were turned inside-out, and wrapped around the ship where we were.

The memory of Abraxander showed me what a flat, two-dimensional man embedded in the surface of a shrinking balloon would see, if he looked to any side of him. The flat two-dimensional waves of light reaching his eye would follow the curve of the balloon: the balloon would seem a level surface to him, and he would see his own body, as if turned inside out, forming a boundary around the edge. As the balloon shrank, each point of his inside-out two-dimensional body would press inward, and the edge grow ever closer, till he was staring himself eye to eye, almost kissing his screaming mouth. So, in three dimensions, was this space around the ship, filled with nothing but a distorted and reversed image of itself, as if trapped in a ping-pong ball, whose inner curve wall all a mirror.

There was no way out. The universe was as if held within a ball of metal.

The iron walls shrank in and grew closer. The hull was crusted as if with barnacles and gargoyles: hulking shapes as big as mountains on a sterile plain of endless pock-marked metal. They had faces; they had eyes.

I could not breathe, for claustrophobic panic seized me.

Pepper whined and barked. I drew a safety match from my pocket, and struck it on the metal barrel of my gun. The tiny, tiny fire in my hand was the only source of light in the universe.

Directly opposite me, directly underfoot, as this hull-wall drawing closer, and in the midst of the rings of mountains-sized sphinxes, was the tiniest imaginable dot of light. There was one porthole, one window, out of all the endless miles of that dark hull, endless rows of blind windows, where the tiniest imaginable man, as if seen from below, hovered with his feet toward me, and held a spark in his fingertip. I saw myself from across the universe, mirror-reverse.

I realized that the universe was now so small that images were circling the diameter of the cosmos to touch my eye.

At the feet of the mountainous sphinxes and huge, inhuman faces, little thin shapes stood, draped in fabric, hooded and veiled. They must have been as tall as trees, for me to see them at this distance, but my soul was struck with chill to see them, for all the hooded shapes were bent toward that one porthole, watching that one spark.

“What if I put her from my mind? What if I simply stop dwelling on her, or on the world I have lost? What if I–”

The words were too absurd even to say them aloud. What if I, by an act of will, forced myself stop loving everything I loved? What if I merely made myself empty inside by wishing it so?

Kitimil chuckled sardonically. He did not even bother to mock me.

I could not bear to see the look of dark, sardonic triumph on his wolfish, brutal face. I threw the match down. The universe went dark.

I blinked. It was not utterly dark.

In the middle of that darkness, from one, unimaginably tiny, unthinkably distant, and yet, somehow, inexpressibly close, point of perfect golden light, something reached out.

And a curtain of flaming light came up from the dark glass surface where I stood, and in the middle of the light was a bright shadow. The shadow was curved and slender, a woman's shape, and I saw the eyes and lips that I adored, the hair brighter than gold, and she lifted her small, well-shaped hands toward me.

It was Lisa.

I could not help but step forward. I could not have stopped myself, not even to save the universe. We embraced. Warmth was all around me.

I woke.

146. In The Tent

I was laying on a canvass cot, dressed in no more than a shirt. To one side of me, a camp stool with square wooden legs served as my nightstand: here was a thermometer of red mercury, a shaving glass, a small tin box with a red cross on it; the first aid kit. A little stoppered bottle of medicine, with a syringe, was to the left. My hip flask, filled with some devilishly potent stuff I got from the Arab at the depot, was to the right. For a teetotaler, Mahmud knew where to find better than the bathtub gin we drank back in the states.

I swung my feet to the floor, and was dazed for a moment, weak. Beneath my feet was the skin of the tiger I had shot in Bengal, nicely skinned, and the skull dressed with amber chips for eyes.

Beneath the rug, was golden grass, and tiny, reddish clods of dusty-smelling soil were visible between the brown roots of the tufts of grass. A haze of dust hung in the hot air inside the tent, giving it an air of unreality.

I grimaced. An air of unreality was not entirely inappropriate, things being as they were.

From the roofpole of the tent, hung my canteen, shining metal held in a pocket of green canvass. My leather ammo belt and hunting jacket also were nearby, hung up neatly, but of my rifle, there was no sight.

This was not a good sign. One keeps the arms of a feverish man away from him.

Through the open tent flap, I could see a wonder. If you have never beheld Africa, you have never seen clear skies. Nothing in New England is like it. The sky was like hammered pewter in the distance: the sun, a monarch of fire. The hills and swales of sun-baked grass were gold and tawny, the hue of a lion’s mane. In the middle distance, a line of thin, dark, crooked trees marked the wadi where the river would run when the rains came. The plains are wide and wild and large in a fashion no poor soul in Boston will ever see. Many New Englanders understand the romance of the ocean, of far horizons, but this place, as unbound and as mysterious, few understand.

I brushed off my shirt: there were dog hairs all over it. From Pepper. That was odd. But Lisa’s father was an odd sort of duck, and might think it was medically a wise practice to let a man’s dog slobber in his face when he was sick.

A slender shadow fell across the tent.

She was there.

My wife was framed in the triangle of blazing brilliance behind her, the breathless shadows of the tend folds to either side. My eyes could barely focus on her, because of the gloom where I was in the tent, the brightness where she was, and it looked almost as if she were standing at the far side of a tunnel.

Her eyes are as blue as cornflowers, and her hair is gold, and her skin is bronzed and lightly freckled from her days in the sun with me, the nights beneath the tropic stars. She wore riding pants and boots, and a gun belt cinched her narrow waist. The starched white blouse enclosed her curves in military lines. She wore a pith helmet with a scarf floating down her back.

I rose and opened my arms and stepped forward…. And she put up her hand and giggled.

I looked down. There I was in my underwear.

She said in her lilting accent, “Ach, don’t worry it, mein Leibchen. We are man and wife now, yes? On the honeymoon, I am supposed to see your hairy knees. Such hair you have, and everywhere! This is the worse of the ‘for better and worse’, yes?”

Then I did grab her, and I did kiss her. Sobbing, I held on to her, and told her how I had missed her. My words were mumbled, pointless, trite. She was overcome by them nonetheless, and melted into my arms.

I took her lips forcefully enough to dip her back over my arm, a graceful as a waltzing maid, she bowed back, submitting, her arms curling my neck. I could feel, like steel beneath the velvet, the lithe muscles of her slender frame. No, she is not an indoor girl, my Lisa.

One moment, she was shivering from the sob she was trying to keep in. “I thought I had lost you, lost you!” she said. But the next, she was cool and playful, nibbling my ear, and whispering, “Ach, and this is the better, yes? Let Mrs. Powell up for air, Mr. Powell.”

I put my hands on her slim shoulders and pulled her upright. “Anything you say, Mrs. Powell.”

Her helmet was in her hand (she had doffed it during the kiss) and now she raised it as if to don it again, but then stepped into the tent, mopped her brow with the scarf, and dropped the helmet on the cot. “Is too hot in here, Mr. Powell, nie? If you are better feeling, put on the trousers, and let us find a cool spot. You can teach me how to wrestle, like you promise back in Marakeesh.” She favored me with her little impish twinkle, and took the pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of my jacket, which was hanging from a tent peg. Casually she tossed the pack to me, and sat herself on the edge of the cot, her small hands griping the wooded slat to either side, her booted legs crossed, her shouldered slightly shrugged, her head held in a relaxed poise. Her eyes were half lidded as she watched me, and a little sensuous smile crept into her lips.

I drew out two cigarettes, put them both in my mouth, lit them with a safety match, then plucked one from my lips and offered it to her.

She rose languidly, swayed over to me, paused to examine me a moment, and, with the slightest curtsey (for Lisa is a tall woman) she bowed her head a bit, taking the cigarette from between my fingers with her lips without touching it with her hands.

Now she leaned back, drawing thoughtfully, and she blew smoke toward the tent roof. She stood with one hip cocked, her arm half-folded, cigarette dangling from slim fingers, her head tilted to one side. “I think, to be married to you, Meister Powell, I am going to be liking this verr-rr-ry much, yes? Oh, yes.” And she could not hide her smile.

I said, “This is a dream.”

Her smile widened. “Oh, a dream it is, my love, yes.” She tossed back her head and shrugged. “Every bride, is she as happy as I am? I do not believe it. The world could not stay together, if there was so much happiness, so much, in the world. It would burst into pieces!”

“No, I mean this is really a dream. It is not happening. It is taken from life, but it is not life. I was in this tent before, but it was when we first met….I fell ill after drinking bad water. Your father was the nearest white man, and my guides brought me to him. Everyone had heard about the beautiful blonde valkyrie, his daughter, he had brought back with him from Pottsdam, but I had yet to set eyes on you.

“While I was ill, I had strange dreams then, that I was trapped on a ship circling the last of all suns, while brooding faces with staring eyes, or faceless things in hood, all waiting for me to let them and their hellish crew back into the universe again.

“I was delirious for a long, long time.

“You were my nurse. You brought me back from the brink of death. And so I met you.

“You did not walk in on me naked when we first met: and that did happen during our honeymoon. I did not even know I was in love, at first. You were just my friend’s daughter, a woman who liked the wild, a woman who knew how to ride and hunt and shoot drink whisky and smoke tobacco.

“For so many weeks, we were just friends, you and I, friends like man-friends, if you know what I mean, like you were just one of the boys. We told each other everything, including the kind of things a man doesn’t normally tell a woman.

“Mother was wife-hunting for me, when I was back in the states. I asked you to pretend to be my fiancée when I went to visit home, to get Mom off my back. The joke turned real before I knew it. It took me quite a while to smarten up, get on my knee, and give you a ring.”

She smiled at that.

147. Lisa

She said “A long time, yes, too long. But I knew I had you snared when you agreed to take me to see your mama.”

I said with surprise. “I never knew that! You did that on purpose?”

She chuckled warmly. “Do not underestimate the superior mind.”

“But it was just a joke I was playing on my Mother.”

“To you. Women do not joke about such things,” she said primly.

“Oh, come now. It was my idea to…”

“Ta-ra-ra.” She snapped her fingers. “I pick to marry you, so it is done, but I am patient, as the huntress is patient, for you to come to your senses, and ask.”

I said slowly: “I never knew that when I was alive. That means this scene, this dream, cannot be just from my memory.”

I gestured to the right and left. “This is from when we first met. But your little speech about seeing me naked, my hairy legs, that was when you surprised me in the binnacle. We were aboard my cousin’s schooner for our honeymoon, touring the Aegean, seeing the Greek Islands. Strange. The monsters, well, they somehow must have confused or combined elements from the two happiest periods in my life. But it never happened this way, not while I was alive.”

“What—what do you mean?”

“I am dead, my dear. I think you are pregnant when I marched off to war, because you were so moody. I actually had your letter in my hand, and had lit a match to read it, when a sniper saw my light and shot me. Took me about an hour to bleed to death. Stupid of me. I won’t do that again. Never did find out what was in that letter. I hope it was good news.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, and puffed a nervous little puff. “Ah! What is this you say? Never mind it! Listen: Little ones; how many children do you think we will haff? I am strong; you have good bones. How many?”

I said, “Seven. Four sons, three girls.”

She smiled at that, and her eyes danced. “Seven? This is not bad. No so many as Mama, but—“ she shrugged. “I am the modern woman now, yes? American.”

“Two of the boys will grow up strong and tall; one of them dies in the crib. The girls will be as beautiful as their mother. We will lose our sons in the war.” I heaved a sigh. “That is not all you will lose to war. Our eldest boy will be called Frederick, after your grandfather. When he is fourteen, he will be the man of the house, and yours sons will comfort you, once I am … gone … you will still be young, with children between six and sixteen, and your folks will urge you to remarry. Long you will live, my love, long enough to see a man step onto the Moon.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the gleaming love-joy in her eyes was muted. Another puff of the cigarette: this one rapid, nervous. “This joke you are making, I do not like it. Die in crib? Gott! That you should say such a thing! War? What war?”

“Two wars. Germany will rearm. Pacifists will weaken the will of the West to resist, and England will be slow to cry foul. A terrible war. A war fought with scientific weapons. Flying machines. Poison gas. Rapid-firing guns; cannon with rifled barrels. There will be an armistice for twenty-one years, and then the Germans will attack again, and the Japanese will help them. There will be Ironclads and land ironclads. Rockets. Planes made of steel. A wireless method for detecting ships at sea. Bombs that turn whole cities into ash.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Lay down. You have been sick. You must wake up from this.” I sat on the bed and she passed me the hip flask. “Drink! You will feel better.”

It burned my throat, but turned into a pleasant warmth in my chest and belly. I said, “I have stepped outside of time, and the devils want to use me to recreate all the misery in the universe. If I let them. I am the last life-line, the last thread, stretching between—I don’t know what to call it—heaven and hell, I guess. The devils want to use me to call back the things I love. You. Your family through you, and mine through me, I suppose. You could get all the generations of man back to the beginning, that way, I suppose, because no one was never loved by no one: every baby had a mother some time. And–”

She said sharply, “Let us hear no more of this talk! You, you make yourself sick again, you are, yes?” Angrily she threw down the cigarette butt and stamped it under her toe.

So many things about her are so perfect. The line of her thigh when she lifted her leg to step, the black and shining gleam on the toe of her boot. Such a little foot, so pretty. The flash in her eye, blue as summer skies, when she tossed back her head and blew from her red lips upwards, to dislodge some fine strand that had escaped her tight coif to tickle her nose. Everything she did was comical, and sweet, and solemn, and dainty, and fierce, and, oh, so very feminine.

I said, “This is a dream. All the details are wrong. Look.” I plucked the dog hair off my shirt. “I did not get Pepper until four years after we were married. How can his hair be on my shirt? This is the camp where I first met you, but you are talking and acting as you did on our wedding night, which we spent, if you recall, on my cousin's schooner, sailing the Aegean.”

I looked back and forth. “All the details are right. Little things. My tiger rug. But I never would have used it for a ground cloth. And the amber beads my taxidermist used for the eyes: I bought them in the queer little market in Ciaro. I have not been to Cairo yet. But I loved that rug, and it did feature prominently on my honeymoon.”

She looked at the dog hair, and at the rug, a vertical crease of annoyance between her pale eyebrows. Then she giggled at the rug, and smiled her wicked little smile, hiding it unsuccessfully behind her fingers.

I said sadly, “Naughty girl, thinking about the honeymoon uses of a tiger-skin rug at a time like this. And, yes, that is why it becomes one of my favorite rugs.”

“Very well!” she said, growing sober, and she put on her face what I like to call ‘her Prussian face’, which she would use in years to come when she was trying to explain to our children, why it was illogical to cry, or why it was important to stand up to schoolyard bullies, even when very afraid.

“Let us be scientific about this, yes? You say this is a dream. What dream?”

“It is the moment of time between the destruction of the old universe, and the beginning of the new one. It may be too late already, but something must be happening now, right now, to set things so that the new universe is created as one They also own.”

“So, then,” she shrugged, “You wake up, new universe starts, all is happy, yes? We go back to the honeymoon. I want to start on the seven little ones. Will be a lot of work.”

How could I help but smile? It brought tears to my eyes, to see her again. But it was strange to see her so young! So thin! I had to hide my eyes in my hand, so that she would not see my tears.

“You are in pain? I will get mine father.”

“Wait,” I said. “Let us be scientific about this. The devils—I don’t know what to call them. They are not from inside the universe—want to use me, want to use my love for you, to do what? Kitimil would know. Something bad. Mr. Bliss spoke of orchestrating the moment of creation, running it like it was an adding machine to sum up to what he wanted. Mr. Threshold said we could use his art, the dimensional rotation, to move ideas from the realm of memory into the material realm, folding something along the time-axis back into three dimensional space, fleshed from dreams. But he said we needed to use the ship’s engines to do it. And he said. What is the word? The enemy was ‘entangled’ with them. As if it were tainted or poisoned.”

She started to move away. “Father will help you…”

I held up the hair from my coat again. “Whose dog is this?”

She said. “Pepper. He leaves the hair over everything. You know that.”

“Where is Pepper now?”

“With your mother, at her house, back in Nantucket.”

“Across the Ocean. Then how can his hair be here? How can I do—this?”

Since imagination, like everything else, was part of the indistinct totality, I needed do no more than imagine the thousand-sided nine-dimensional hypersolid, anchored it in the points that Abraxander’s people had prepared to receive it, and the imaginary object would move the ideal object, which effect the time-versions of the object. And time, after all, was merely one aspect of space. A slight pressure was all that was needed to move from the fourth to the third dimension. A link led from the hair, along the time-axis, the to source of the hair. And of course I love my dog. So, I squinted, and–

There came a bark echoing in the distance, faint as a dream, like the wind. Then paws were rustling through the grass of the plains. Then, loud, sloppy, solid, and needing a flea bath, Pepper bounded into the tent.

I petted him and made much ado over him while Lisa, showing great aplomb, helped herself to a slug from the hip flask. She coughed and sneezed only a little.

She said, “Enough. Proof is proof. I believe.”

“Then help me?”

“How? This means I am not real, either, you know.”

I blinked at that. “I – I suppose. Are you an image in my mind, or—a ghost? A hope?”

She shook her head brusquely, her Prussian look back on her finely sculpted features. “An image of something to come. A temptation. No matter. I will help. What am I to do, eh?”

“You must help me to commit suicide.” I passed my left hand over my right forearm. Again, I saw the multi-dimensional geometric shape in my minds eye. Again, I turned it. Ydmos was myself, reincarnated into the future. Surely no man has ever lived, who does not love himself, with some part of his heart, in some way.

When I drew my hand back, I saw the raised red spot on my forearm where the capsule was embedded. The capsule is made so that the venom is released both into the mouth, and into the big veins near the elbow, when the traveler despairs of ever returning to the Last Redoubt as a human, and bites it.

148. Suicide

She put her little hand over the reddish mark on my arm. “No,” she said. “That is madness, cowardice.”

I said, “Not cowardice. Not when done for reasons such as these. The Romans often slew themselves when…”

She just gave a snort of contempt. “Romans, eh? Italians, but old, that is all.”

“They were brave and great men: Trajan; Cato; Aeneas; Seneca…”

“The pagan, he martyrs himself to serve his own glory, no? And on the inside, he worships himself. Just himself, nothing else. Very small thing, a man; not a good thing to worship, I think.”

“Japanese Samurai, when his honor has been…”

She just rolled her eyes at that. “Honor! Another word for man who talks big, too scared to back down when people are watching. Universe is dead, you say. No one watching now.”

I drew back from her. “You think it is a sin, don’t you? A mortal sin.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me closely. She said, “I know you, Reginald. Your father, he believe in nothing, he like to go fishing on Sundays, so he let you skip church. Then you listen to college boys, and you decide to be the fool, in his heart, who says there is no God, eh? Fine. Maybe there is, maybe there is not. Many men, many brave good men, believe this thing, many years. But suppose it is a lie. Why is it so convincing? Why so many men believe this lie, all these years? Good men and wise. Every country, even pagans, some sort of heaven, some sort of God.”

I said, “All men fear death. All men regret that there is no justice in the world. All men are horrified to imagine that this, all of life, is an empty abyss.” And I remembered the words of Crystals-of-Bliss. He, too, had been another incarnation of mine, hadn’t he? “So they invent a story to make it all make sense.”

She pursed her lips. “So. This story, if men were cowardly little things, they would have a cowardly little story, yes? If the story tells you, ‘Man, he is too fine a thing, like an angel, a thing like fire, divine fire, he is too fine for you to kill him’ that is not a little story. That is big story, yes? What kind of man listen to that kind of story? Big man.” She reached and pulled the cigarette from my fingers to take a puff.

Her left hand was gripping her right elbow, and her right hand was near her face. Her hips were cocked to one side in a relaxed posture. She seemed so golden, like a cornstalk, so supple, like a steel epee, and the smoke drifted above her, catching stray rays of sunlight that pierced the stitching in the tent, and turning to golden motes.

Lisa continued: “Maybe story is not true, maybe it is. I think about that later.” She shrugged. “But this story, it tells you life is good, life is sacred, then it is not a bad story, no? Because a good story, it gives you the heart to do the right thing when the wrong thing seems wise and brave. So?”

I shook my head. There was no point in trying to explain things to a woman, even a woman as Amazonian as Lisa. I said, “There are things more sacred than one’s own life. Ask any soldier.”

“It is an insult to all that lives, you know.”

I said, “What is?”

“To kill yourself. You are saying to the bird: Sing no more to me. You are saying to the sun: Shine no more on me. You are saying to the tree: I need no shade of you, do not stand. No drink from the stream, no twinkle from the star, no smile from a human face, no bark from the dog who is loyal. To everything, you say: I hate you.”

I rose to my feet. “But this is a dream. I am being shown what I am about to lose. The birds and suns and stars, everything we thought eternal, it is all gone.”

She jabbed the cigarette toward me an in angry gesture. “Then what is worth fighting for, eh? You are alone in the universe. Everyone dead. Nothing is real. No one is watching. What is worth fighting for? What is worth dying for?”

I squinted at her. “So tell me.”

She sniffed. “Same as before. Same things as when you were alive. You remember you are a man, yes? You know what it means to be a man?”

I opened my mouth to answer her, but the dream faded. Lisa evaporated like cigarette smoke. The warm African sun, the savage and beautiful golden plains; it all vanished.

149. The Plain Of Silence

It seemed to me I hovered in the void, above a vast, limitless, plain. Nothing on earth could be so large as that: the plain had no end. All was drench in an unpleasant reddish light, as if from the coal of a dying fire. Above me was a black circle, vast as the sun, and from the edges of this disk were arms of fire. It looked perhaps like an eclipse, perhaps like the burning atmosphere of a dead sun.

Directly below the dead sun was an impact crater, marring the flat perfection of the ruby plain. As I dropped my gaze, my point of view dropped. Swift as a falcon stooping, I was thrown down through miles of air into the crater.

The crater was larger than the Earth. A planet the size of Jupiter, falling, could have made such a place. The debris thrown up form the crater were taller than mountains to each side. The Himalayas, Mt. Everest itself, would have been less than a foothill, compare to these terrible slopes. The peaks were hundreds of miles high.

So deep was the crater, that, even at my speeds, many minutes passed before the floor came into view: a land larger than Texas, made all of cracks and canyons, pock-marks from lesser craters, long-cold lava-flows, dead volcanoes, hills of ash and soot. It was a sterile world of lifelessness. No drop of water, no blade of grass, no midge, no mite, no smallest thing was here.

Except, suddenly, in the middle of the crater floor, rising atop a lonely peak, was a house of greenish jade. It was a strange and massive house, built of cyclopean blocks, like the Great Wall of China, or the circle at Stonehenge. The house was circular in form, and had three stories, with walls of shining green brick and barred windows built between the massive cyclopean columns. But the oddest architectural feature was the little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, that rose from each wall. The rooftops had curved and crooked eaves, giving it a look something like that of a Viking longhouse, or a Chinese pagoda.

I looked up, and saw something suggestive in the black sun hanging directly overhead. If there had been a light burning under the silent house, and a vast ceiling above it, it would have cast a shadow shaped something like the disk overhead, and all the flame-shaped pinnacles and eaves would have cast the flaming corona.

The doors of the house were barred and locked, and every window as well.

Kitimil was sitting on the doorstep of the house. The front door was a low arch, and a heavy roof, held up by thick posts, formed the porch, and continued upward to form the second floor, that overhung the first. The whole porch was countersunk into the façade of the house, so that to enter the main doors, one had to pass through was like a low-roofed tunnel.

It was cold, bitterly cold here, and my lungs heaved but drew no breath. Almost without thinking, I rotated into being around me the arms and armor I remember from my life as Ydmos. The Living Steel clasp by chest; the gray cloak emitted heat; I took up the cup from my pouch and held it over my mouth and nose, and the substance of the metal in the cup somehow turned into fresh air.

In my other hand, the Diskos, that terrible weapon. The disk-shaped blade was motionless, but, beneath my gauntlet, the haft of the weapon tingled and throbbed. There was something achingly familiar about it; a sense of ferocious loyalty. Pepper? Could a futuristic weapon be haunted by the ghost of a long-dead hound? The idea was silly, and yet….

Kitimil was seated as I have seen Tibetan sit, with his heels on the ground and his rump resting on his ankles. He was dressed in his wolf-skins. In one paw was his bone truncheon; in his other, was a fist-sized statuette of a big-bosomed and pregnant woman, very crudely carved. Kitimil was rubbing the big belly of the mother-stone, and crooning to himself.

I stepped toward him. “Where is this place?”

He looked up. “This–” He gestured toward the outer gloom of blood-colored light. “This is the scaffolding of the new universe.”

“We are not in the universe?”

“No. There must be some outside place for the scaffold to stand.”

“And this house?”

“This is the House of Silence. In your era, it stands in the west of Ireland lies, near a village called Kraighten. It is swallowed by the Earth, so that, in the time of Ydmos, it will be present when the earth is shattered to her core. There will be a great valley, warmed by the last ember of dying geothermal heat, where the Last Redoubt rises; and the House of Silence stands on a small hill to the north. Their poets say the doors of this house have never been closed since all eternity: but there are many time, years and centuries at a time, when the doors close and nothing from the Night World enters the three dimensions occupied by man. Each time, the doors open for you.”

“What is in this house?”

“Everything. The seed of all time and space is within, waiting to begin its growth. And outside …”

He made a gesture, pointing to the slopes.

At first, I thought they were statues, sphinxes built of an unimaginable scale. I could not calculate the size; they were on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the crater, and so must have been hundreds or thousands of miles away from me. Something as far off as the Moon is visible to the naked eye, but only if it is as large as the Moon.

But no; they were not statues. Every few miles, peering from behind the Everest-sized hills and hillocks of those endless, immense slopes that surrounded the crater, were vast and inhuman faces, staring eyes. Godlike visages, you could call them, but only if gods were bent utterly on cruel and dark and inhuman purposes. One of them had the head of a jackal; another wore a necklace of skulls, and held up many weapons in many arms. Others looked like the monsters and grotesques from Polynesian totems, or the squat and ugly carvings from buried Aztec temples.

I said, “They are waiting to enter in. I will not open the door for them.”

He shook his head, and showed his fangs: an expression of sardonic pity. “I have said before: you are not the one who opens it. It cannot be opened from this side. It is opened for you.”

I heard, very softly, a footstep behind the door, as if some slight figure were coming down the stairs to a main hall, approaching.

A woman’s footstep.

I remembered the horrid image of the iron spaceship hull, surrounding me, closing in. I thought once again of what a two-dimensional man, living in the surface of a balloon, might see, how it might look to him, if the balloon were turned inside-out.

I said, “If it is larger on the inside, then, no matter what this seems to look like, these—these giant blocks—these are the inner walls. This endless plain out here is not the outside. It is the inside, a tomb, perhaps, or a prison-cell.”

He pointed with his bone truncheon. In the far distance, with no noise at all, the jackal-headed giant, taller than the tallest mountain of earth, had risen to its monstrous feet. The other huge and terrible figures were still recumbent. I cannot express how inhuman, even now, when one of them had moved, was the sense of the pressure of eternity here: the utter, absolute stillness of the watchers was oppressive, like staring at the dark place between the stars on a moonless night, and realizing your eyes were showing you a night with no further shore to it, an abyss without bounds. If that abyss could turn and look at you, it would wear such as face as these watching things.

“These are gods. Who could imprison them?”

I said, “Who indeed? There is a way out of this trap.”

“No. Even if you kill yourself, you only end up back here. This is where those who kill themselves are sent.”

I pointed at the hideous outer gods watching us with unblinking eyes from the vast slopes of the red-lit crater walls. “And them?”

“They destroyed the first universe, and themselves, because they hated it. Call that rebellion, if you wish, but it is something far worse. It is the malice that is utterly selfless, willing to die, merely so that the object of your malice might suffer.”

I remembered what Lisa said about the insult to all life a suicide committed. “Life threw them out of her house.”

“You think it is a punishment? A river is not punished for falling downhill to merge and be swallowed by the sea.”

I said, “And you and I are here because…”

“We trafficked with them. We made a bargain. When you were Enoch. When I was Uj. We stepped outside of time, and they were waiting there. So, is there a way out of the trap? This trap is the size of the universe.”

“I could kill you. You said your memories were needed to complete the recreation, to make the new universe like the old one.”

“And so you could have done, back aboard the Spirit of Man. But here? My part of this work was done. I called the ghost aboard the ship; you embraced her. Nothing more is needed.”

“At least you will pay for your part in this!” I lift up the heavy pole. The disk in the tines at the head of the pole-arm began to spin, and it made a low, rumbling roar. White light flashed from the spinning blade, relieving, for a moment, the hideous redness all around us. In the white light, the face of Kitimil seemed young, unlined, untroubled. He showed his fangs and laughed.

“They granted me that I should live again, ever and forever, and that Magigi would come to me again. Strike! I am unarmed.” He threw the bone truncheon from his hand, so that it fell down the steps of the porch and landed in the ash of the red crater floor.

I doused the weapon and lowered it. I had the memories of Ydmos in me: the wrongness of using this weapon against anything but a monster stayed my hand.

I looked out at the giants, the fallen gods, the creatures of darkness. Even Ydmos would not take up his weapon where he was so overmatched. Smiting a Night-Hound was possible; smiting a creature the size of a mountain was comical; smiting a four- or five- or thousand-dimensional being was inconceivable. It would be like trying to hit Time with a stick, or the abstract concept of Life, or shoot the Color Blue, or snare the blast from a trumpet in a fisherman’s net.

There was a noise from behind the low, thick door to the House. A scrape of metal; as if someone were fumbling with the key.

In the remote distance, the jackal-headed god had raised his hand. A company of abhuman creatures, swine-headed and loathsome to the eye, came trotting around the wing of the House. They walked on two feet, like men, and carried axes and maces in their paws. When the leader of the band saw me, it threw back its snout and gave a high-pitched squeal of rage and hate. The other abhumans snorted and grunted with pleasure and bloodlust, and the ground broke into a run, coming for the stairs to the porch.

I put the Diskos to one side. It stood upright, hovering a half inch off the ground, waiting. I rotated my other weapon into being in my hands, raised my trusty Holland and Holland rifle, took aim at the leader of the swine-things, and shot.

I killed two more before they were upon me. The Diskos jumped back into my hands; I swung the mighty weapons and tore a swine-creature in half. Lightening sizzled from the blade, jarring and shocking swine-men touching the one I bisected. Bloodstains were on the ceiling above me: I swung the pole-arm left and right, chopping off limbs and heads….

I was knocked from my feet. A swine-man broke his dagger against the stubborn armor of my chest; but the stink of his breath was in my nostrils; I could see the tiny hairs of his bristles around his white eyes, the fluid down the twin tubes of his ugly nose, the foam on his tusks….

The door behind me shivered in its frame. A cracked of light appeared, running from the top of the doorframe to the threshold. A low, thin, piercing cry (which I heard even above the roar of my disk-weapon, above the hideous pig-squealing of the abhumans) echoed from the distant Watchers. They had waited an eternity. They had waited for an entire universe to grow old and die. They had waited for this moment.

Two of the swine-men wrestled the Diskos from my grasp. The weapons shocked them, and they fell, theirs paws burnt and bloody from where they had touched the haft. The memories of Ydmos stirred in my memory: and I wondered from where the charge of Earth-Current the weapon was using had come.

Something else from Ydmos stirred in my memory as well. His people knew the art of resisting mental domination. It had not worked perfectly, and the enemy could find ways around it, as it had with him, for the enemy had found a way to drive him mad, and have his kill his own loved ones.

But, he still knew enough to know how false memories could be implanted.

I remembered the Irish Elk. I remembered what he great and magnificent beasts had looked like, rushing along the grassy plains which, at that time, stretched across all Europe, including the peninsula that one day, half-submerged, would be the British Isles.

How had I not seen it before? He-Sings-Death was a caveman, from some fourteen thousand years before Christ. Enoch was a Biblical antediluvian. The ages of the Biblical patriarchs, when added up, did not reach back farther than 4000 or 5000 years at most: less than half the time. Kitimil was a Neanderthal Man. His race date from two hundred thousand years before Christ. The Neanderthal came from world that Nephilim, the sons of Caine, could not come from.

These outer beings were not fallen angels. They were not the devils from the mother’s Bible lore, any more than they were the Dry Folk of The Smotherer that He-Sings-Death took them to be.

It was a lie. The memories in my head of Enoch, son of Caine were in invention. I had never made a bargain with the Dark Powers. I had never bowed down to them.

My soul was not entangled with them. I rotated the thousand-sized figure in my mind, and, at once, the false memories of Enoch were gone. Whatever happened now, they could not follow me through my own soul. The worm had wiggled off the hook.

Even with half a dozen of the squealing, stinking, pig-things on me, I reached out my hand. Ydmos did not know how the Diskos was magnetically attuned to the soul of the user. The science, by his time, had been forgotten. But Abraxander-the-Threshold knew it. A slight push in my imagination on the thousand-sized figure, and the mighty weapon popped into and out of the fourth dimension and it was in my hand again.

Ydmos did not know how the spiritual energies in the weapon were programmed. He did not even know what the weapon was made of. But the Blue Man knew. I knew. The slightest touch on the thousand-sized figure brought the blue assemblers into my bloodstream, my skin, my nervous system. I had no need for the two systems to “handshake”, since the Diskos was already attuned to me. As quickly as that, and I had a mental link with the spirit in the weapon; and I knew the programming codes.

The safety interlock disengaged. Ydmos had not even known there was a safety interlock. I programmed the weapon to do what it was that the arrows of Mneseus had done, but with tremendously more force than a spark rubbed from Amber could summon. Then, mentally, I order the power core to overload.

White fire shined from the weapon, and flashes of terrible lighting shot in each direction. My armor grounded me, but not the swine-things touching me. The electricity flowed to them and to their comrades touching them. The whole huddle of the creatures was paralyzed as their limbs jerked with torture-spasms. I stood, and threw the whole lot of them from me. The one or two not already dead, I decapitated with a backhand stroke of the mighty weapon. Sparks and black smoke poured from the piled corpses around me.

He-Sings-Death had not known why the after-life creatures, the monster he had thought was the King of the Dead had allowed him to see the ghost of his wife in a dream, but Ydmos understood the aetheric energies involved in connecting the living and the dead. Mneseus understood necromancy. He-Sings-Death thought that the horror he had met, had begged, and had sung his sad songs to, had been moved by his plea to allow his wife to live again. All a deception. All a lie. The death-being had been used that sorrow, that plea, and those tears to make a connection similar to the connections I was using to call weapons into my hands from across the barrier of time and space. He-Sings-Death had been allowed to go down into the underworld and returned, not to bring his wife to life again, but to let the horrors who fed off the souls of the dead following him back up to the light again. That was why he had been told not to turn his head; so that he would not see what was following him. Poor fool.

He had opened the door for them. But who could close it again, once opened?

The swine-things were slain or thrown back, but, at that same moment, like a mist rising from the ground, I saw dozens of pale and terrible spirits, hooded and shrouded in gray, and silent as death itself, standing before me. I heard the door hinges creak behind me, and the door swung open.

I backed up, and took my position in the threshold. She was behind me, as I knew she would be. Kitimil, I did not see him; I hope he scuttled inside during the confusion. Even him, I would not leave out there, in the airless red plain of silence, with them.

The silent, robed figures raised their left hands, all in unison. The open doors turned into green jade, and the stones of the porch and threshold melded or bonded with them in a strange fashion I did not comprehend.

The door now could not be shut.

All the silent, huge and misshapen outer gods rose to their feet, sending the mountains tumbling.

150. The Master Of The Master-Word

One of the hooded figures glanced at me, and my heart burned with cold in my chest, so painfully that I would have dropped my weapon, if my weapon were not, of its own accord, holding itself in my hand. I would have knelt and fainted, had not the soft hands behind me, woman’s hands, held onto my gray cloak. I leaned heavily on the shaft of my weapon, and she prevented me from falling.

I said, “Why didn’t you leave me out here?”

From behind me, I felt her warm breath tickling my ear. “Don’t be silly. Say the word.”

She was using the language of Ydmos’ time. It was the Inner Speech, the tongue he had never thought to hear again.

And the declension using in that strange language was not the mode used when a grave danger threatened. It was the mode used only during decontamination procedures. He voice was rich with unspoken laughter. At the very moment of the utter and absolute victory of darkness, she was amused at them, as if they were harmless: a mere afterthought, a fading nightmare, which the new universe would soon forget.

The word she meant, of course, was the Master-Word.

I said, “What? The Master-Word won’t drive them away. It has no power over them. It is merely something they cannot say.”

She said, “A dog hair cannot bite someone, but you called Pepper from outside of time. You called Africa to you, and me. Why not more? There is One who is out there, who can do more than Pepper can.”

“What One? Who?”

“The One who promises that all lovers will be reunited after the end.”

I said the Master-Word. She was right. I could sense or see links, like the same chain that bound my soul to hers, running from the Master-Word to some ulterior power beyond all space and time.

With the slightest rotation of the thousand-dimensional solid, I brought the being, whatever it was, that had first spoken that word into being, and invited Him to enter this scene, this universe, and my life.

The light was too bright to look at, but, once I got used to it, I saw her, and I turned, and I embraced her, despite the hardness of my armor. The door closed behind me.

It was so bright.

Books by John C. Wright

CASTALIA HOUSE

Awake in the Night Land

TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

THE GOLDEN AGE

The Golden Age

The Phoenix Exultant

The Golden Transcendence

WAR OF THE DREAMING

Last Guardian of Everness

Mists of Everness

CHRONICLES OF CHAOS

Orphans of Chaos

Fugitives of Chaos

Titans of Chaos

COUNT TO THE ESCHATON

Count to a Trillion

The Hermetic Millennia

Judge of Ages

OTHER NOVELS

Null-A Continuum

FANTASY

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

A Magic Broken by Vox Day

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day

The Wardog's Coin by Vox Day

The Last Witchking by Vox Day

Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy by Vox Day

The Altar of Hate by Vox Day

The War in Heaven by Theodore Beale

The World in Shadow by Theodore Beale

The Wrath of Angels by Theodore Beale

SCIENCE FICTION

Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman

The Court-Martial of Ratha Flower Wood by Tom Kratman

The Stars Came Back by Rolf Nelson

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills by Steve Rzasa and Vox Day

QUANTUM MORTIS The Programmed Mind by Vox Day

CASTALIA CLASSICS

The Programmed Man by Jeff Sutton

First On the Moon by Jeff Sutton

NON-FICTION

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright

TRANSLATIONS

Särjetty taika

Uma Magia Perdida

Mantra yang Rusak

La Moneta dal Mercenario

I Ragazzi non Piangono

Sveglio nel Paese della Notte

QUANTUM MORTIS Тежина Смрти

QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand

Grosse Jungs weinen nicht

QUANTUM MORTIS L’Esprit Programmé