Awake in the Night Land (20 page)

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.

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 were 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 were 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.

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.