Awake in the Night Land (29 page)

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.

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.

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.

I found that I could avoid the dangerous of the thoughts that reached through the night toward me, or the shapes I could sense pressing in on the frayed fabric of reality like the liniments of a corpse seen through a winding sheet. These things had been the gravest danger to men of the olden days, before the perfections of the mind sciences. But my meditations were sterner than the gray armor on my body, and walked unseen and unharmed among invisible powers.

Of the lesser creatures I was in greater danger. I saw the lights from a nest of abhumans one watch, and from the hooting calls and grunts, I knew one of the dread powers they served had sent them a warning dream about me. I saw the silhouettes of their own wife and children they had impaled on tall spires made of bone, in return for the omen.

The abhumans things thought more like men than the Night Hounds, the giants, or the behemoths, and they were cunning to guess my ways. All the way past the Red Pit I fled them, keeping my thoughts silent, and taking no time to sleep or rest.

I made my way toward the Plain of Blue Fire, which I knew from my studies the abhumans were wont to fear and avoid. I was approaching it from an angle no traveler had ever seen, for all travelers erenow had been wise enough not to pass between the Plain and the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill. The Greater Dome of Too Many Doors looms there, sometimes visible against the Seven Lights far to the north, and it was known that Silent Ones pass in and out of this Dome at times. It was known from long-range analysis of mephitic vapors and the changes over centuries in the heat detected here, that there was a Lesser Dome in the area, and it was thought to be more dangerous than the Greater.

But as I crawled or ran from rock to rock (there was no moss bushes in this area, and the ground was deadly cold) I saw something no traveler had ever seen. Like the fingers of a peninsula, I saw long acres of normal, non-glowing earth and rock reaching into the Plain of Blue Fire. Above these patches of ground no silent and shimmering hundred-foot-high curtains of deadly energies swayed.

With the abhumans behind me, and the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill to my left, this unexpected bridge of land across the blue-black fires seemed fortuitous. I went that direction.

Soon I was crossing a landscape of craters and jagged rocks, and far to one hand and far to the other were curtains of opaque blue. I could not feel any deadly influences, but the metal of my cup turned dark, warning me that certain part of my body were being effected. I lowered my faceplate and continued. The abhumans were not made of flesh and bone different from mine, and they had no armor.

Then, an even happier fortune struck. It had long been know that certain large islands of uncursed earth could be found within the Plain of Blue Fire, for there were several dead volcanoes in the middle of the Plain, and in some eon long past they had flung out hills of ash and burned rock tall enough to overtop the Blue Fire. These volcano craters formed ridges and cliffs where the Fire did not reach. I knew from the maps that arms of old lava flows reached across the Plain of Blue Fire in that direction. If the corridor of normal earth through this hideous land of silent flames touched the volcano cliff at any point, then I knew a way to go to escape.

And I rejoiced in my heart, because I knew the Silent Ones killed any abhumans passing too near the Greater Dome of Too Many Doors, which was where I had found the Blue Flames open and a swath of ground where humans could walk.

With the pale blue energy leaking from the burnt earth to my left and right, I climbed for two watches up one of these ridges, hearing no dreams or passions from the Abhumans beating through the dark air behind me.

There were no earthly thoughts about cracking bones and drinking blood. I could have understood these thoughts. There was only a brooding malice from the Northwest Watcher, accompanied by shapes and symbols I could not comprehend, and which it was not safe to contemplate; and an eerie watchfulness issuing from the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, which also gave me a sense of foreboding.

I climbed the sides of one of the long-dead volcanoes, tormented by cold and wishes its old fires were present now. With each step, I felt I was safer. The fatigue grew too much for me.

I halted on a small shelf of rock. The blue light was now below me like the sea I have seen in dreams. The shadows I saw moving in it only one explorer before claimed to have seen, and his report was much doubted, for it came from one of those many dark ages in human history when the records of the middle and higher cities in the Pyramid where not well kept. At times I thought they were rounded huts, or at other times, great wormlike slugs. They made no noise whatever, and the blue fires which clung to the place did not harm them, so I knew them not to be made of matter as we understood it.

I made my cloak radiate powerful warmth, and reclined on it, and rested and ate of tablets of sustenance. I drank also from my cup, for I was must athirst.

The gratitude I felt escaped from my brain elements like a sigh. That was a mischance. Even without any taste or luxury, the act of consuming food and water was too wholesome for this place, and in my weariness I had let slip my wariness.

For as I drank, I had raised my eyes, and then my cup, in salute to that Mighty Home of Life in the vast dark behind me. I could see the Last Redoubt, shining and beautiful in the distance. Through the air, like an inaudible glissando of music thrilling around me, I felt the gathered thoughts and good wishes of the millions watching through the viewing tables and spyglasses.

And, also I saw, between me and the balconies and lanterns my home, the shape of the Northwest Watching Thing. Its shoulder and the rear parts of its misshapen skull were silhouetted against the vast triangular shape of light. 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.

There was a flare of lightning in the air to the west, a rare mid-air burst. I looked in the jarring moment of light and saw in the middle of the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, an structure often theorized but never clearly seen, called the Lesser Dome of Too Many Doors. It was windowless and crusted with pentagonal cracks as if it had been the shell of a monstrous tortoise. From each of those doors in each direction came the watching sensation; and, unlike the House of Silence, it was not bright, but dark.

One of the shapes that squatted at those doors, even though I was miles away, must have seen or sensed me. A force came rushing through the air like a silent wind. I fell to the ground as one dead, not able to stir a muscle.

Grimacing, I fought to regain my composure and the control of my limbs. I raised my head by sheer strength, as a dawn age man might have done, driven by sheer stubborn rage and horror. But my eyes them fell upon something never reported in all the annals of the Monstruwacans: certain acres of the Plain of Blue Fire, one after another, where either flaring into brighter activity, or dying down entirely. Unlike our fires, these were utterly opaque, and the human eye cannot see through them. But from my higher vantage, I saw the moving shapes that lived in the flame were marching or gathering, and where they passed, some activity of theirs doused or excited the fires.

I ceased to struggle in the primitive way of my previous incarnations, but cleared and lifted my mind to all that was most noble and pure in human consciousness. I breathed in the fashion I was trained to do, and used my brain elements to establish strength and peace throughout my nervous system.

This was not an easy task. Perhaps an hour passed, perhaps more.

I came to myself again, and saw where a path had been cleared between my position and the edge of the Blue Plain. Unlike the path I had taken, this one did not approach the Place of Killing. The blue non-light hid more than it lit, but there were ambling shapes in that clear corridor, approaching with haste.