Awake in the Night Land (26 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.