Awake in the Night Land (34 page)

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 Carta, 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 as 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 of 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 what 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.

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.

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?

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 31
^st
. On that scale, Christ was born an hour past noon of January 1
^st
. 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 2
^nd
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.

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.