Awake in the Night Land (21 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.