Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  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.

  78.

  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.

  79.

  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.

  Now she whined a friendly whine, and her lolling scorpion-tail lashed back and forth, and with her nose she nuzzled the scrip where I had been carrying my tablets. But there were none left to feed her.

  This most hateful monster of my race, the most ancient enemy of man, I could not raise my weapon to smite her, even though all wisdom and reason said I must.

  Instead I said, “Help me. Help me carry the body back.”

  The blood-red eyes glared at me unwinkingly, and ropy drool fell from between her shark-teeth, but she seemed to understand, and she lashed her poisonous tail in a friendly fashion.

  80.

  I doffed my gauntlet and stooped and touched my brother’s Diskos where it lay with the back of my hand. There was no jolt, as I expected, but there was a tingle, enough to show me that the Master Monstruwacan had been wrong. Polynices was alive, but his life was somehow suspended.

  I detached the heavy round blade from his Diskos, and gingerly placed the forks of my haft around it. I stood there, expecting to be knocked from my feet by a flare, but I filled my heart with love for my brother, and my memory with little anecdotes and images from our past together. Our souls were close enough together that his weapon did not react, except that it spun and lit up, and the low, terrible hum of the weapon came forth.

  The blade was about forty pounds, almost twice the weight I used in practice. I had to take the heavy aetheric fluid out of the haft of his weapon and pump it into the butt of my own, in order to counterbalance the weight. His weapon I folded and telescoped, and slung across my back.

  The monster retreated when my blade was lit, and now she was staring at me with a look I would have called thoughtful and calculating had I seen it on a human face.

  “Dracaina! Here! Help me lift him!”

  Tentatively she stepped forward. Awkwardly I tried once and twice and three times to get my shoulder under my brother, and pick him up off his feet, and haul him up to the back of the beast, whose shoulder was taller than my head. Had I been in good health, well-fed and well-rested
, it still would have been impossible.

  The monster looked at me sardonically, gripped his cloak in her teeth, and flipped her head backward. His body went flying, heels high into the air, and landed with a sickening thud across the spines and bristles of her back. I bit back a scream, wondering if I had heard bones crack or not.

  I would have stuck my Diskos into the creature’s neck armor then and there, had I not needed her so desperately to haul my brother back to the Last Redoubt.

  I took apart the straps of his war belt and cincture, and used these to tie him awkwardly to her back. The fact that sharp bristles snagged his cloak gave his body enough purchase to stay in place.

  I found his poke, sealed and unopened. Within was a handful of the tablets of nutriment. I immediately swallowed two or three tablets.

  Dracaina whined so plaintively that I had no heart to deny her: the hideous mouth reached down, and, instead of biting off my hand and arm, the grisly lips picked up the offered tablet from my palm with great delicacy. I cannot tell you how strange it was to have the hot breath of a Night Monster tickling my bare hand.

  I reached out and took a tuft of her mane in my left fist, as I had seen Polynices do. Slowly, I began walking all the miles back across the Night Land. Docilely she followed me, bearing my burden for me, something no human would have done for me.

  81.

  Up until the moment when she saved my life, I was planning on killing her.

  You may think it strange that someone my size, as weak as I was then, could make such a plan, but, if so, you have never swung a Diskos. Half the strength of the swing comes from the weapon itself, for there is a grim and stern spirit inside it; and the velocity of the spinning blade would make it bite and cut and pull itself into the wound, even if the blade were merely lightly touching the target. And the flare of Earth-Current is as deadly as a lighting bolt, and the aetheric vibrations fatal to spiritual and neural coherence of nonhumanity.

  It is a dread weapon indeed, and I had no doubt that, once I was nigh the Electric Circle, and needed her aid no longer, I could smite her dead. She could not fend off the stroke with her jaws, after all.

  Such were my thoughts as we walked, her huge bulk lumbering behind my slow steps.

  Then she stopped and raised her head, sniffing the air. She was still as a picture, with only her muzzle whiskers twitching. Her scorpion tail began to swell with poison, like a bladder inflating. Her red eyes turned this way and that in her sockets.

  She knelt, offering me her shoulder.

  I stared in disbelief. It was like something from one of my brother’s dreams. Did she want me to climb onto her shoulders?

  Then I heard a noise both terrifying and welcome. It was the Home-Call, trumpeting forth from the Last Redoubt. From across the miles, someone had spied me, knew me to be alive. I am not surprised. Since the time when I waved my flashing weapon overhead and screamed, I had taken no precautions to hide myself.

  The Home-Call, that mighty voice which rang between the dark, smoke-smothered heavens and the dark, horror-haunted earth, came shouting across the hills and valleys, the smoldering pits and unsleeping monsters, rang out because a danger had also been spied, not far from me.

  I climbed onto Dracaina’s back

  82.

  There was nothing in our life that was like this. If this is what my brother dreamed, when he saw the eldest days of the world, small wonder the dream had obsessed him.

  Every child has surely tried to slide down the banister of some great public stairway. They fall perhaps as fast as this. Or perhaps the flying boys who sail on kites down the miles of the great air shafts, carrying messages, match a speed like this, but they merely glide through the air: a kite is not a huge beast, the heat from her monster heart rising through your grieves, between your legs, her blood-red eye picking out the path from the blurred ground beneath her thundering paws, while you cling to the bristles of her mane, astonished.

  There are wonders in the Last Redoubt, great architectural triumphs, ancient libraries, meshes of bright-work and thought-work which took a half a million years to perfect; there are dances atop the great energy plates which focus the vital forces involved; there are men with strange talents who tell strange tales; there is the great crack in the Earth buried far beneath us, from which the living power surges which grants us life in the cold and deadly world. There is marriage, and childbirth, and pleasure from wine and song and aether-wave sculpture.

  But nothing like this. The sheer animal joy of it was beyond compare. We were going faster than the fastest sprinter of a cross-corridor race, and yet covering more miles than a downstairs marathon.

  83.

  The dark world spun away underfoot as Dracaina pounded it with her claws. To the left and right, I began to see the pursuit.

  You will think me mad, but I laughed with relief. My pursuit was not the Slowly Turning Wheel. It was not the Pale Tree, or the Oblong Cylinder, or the Strangely Quiet Eight-Forked Object. It was not even a Humped Thing, or one of the many Dwellers In the Angles of Time, or a Silent One, or one of the Other Silent Ones. It was human-shaped creatures made of matter and fully occupying our segments of time and space.

  Lopsided men were rising up from doors and hatches in the stone, swarming up like ants from a disturbed hill. I saw their lumpish silhouettes against where lights of the Quiet City laid a path of shining across the Giant’s Sea, and flitting shadows moved across the peaks where firepits gleamed or ground-lightning flared. The creatures had one puny and misshapen arm, a crooked thing which would barely reach their teeth, and one huge and misshapen arm, longer than their legs. In his greater arm, each Lopsided Man carried some crude weapon, a bludgeon of iron, or a hooked spear.

  There were scores of them on our trail, and then there were hundreds.

  More creatures joined the route, were-worms and blind and hairless ape-bears, and a nest of things that slithered like centipedes.

  Once a crablike monster scuttled out in front of us, but Dracaina merely leaped scrabbling up the rocky slope to one side, and outran the ungainly monster. Any of the Lopsided Men who came too close she snapped up in her jaws, and tossed them far away. Once she plunged into a stream of foetid water, and splashing hugely through the shallows, curtains of mud rising to each side of us, and then swimming through a deeper, cleaner section, where steam rose above a pungent scent. Many of the creatures pursuing us halted at the banks, growling and yelping.

  When she reached the far bank, again her paws surged, and again we flew like the wind, outdistancing all pursuit.

  We came suddenly upon the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk. I tugged on her mane and shouted for her to stop, for I saw, less than a mile from us, three figures draped in gray gauze standing on the road, their hoods turned toward each other as if they pondered a question together. With a flying leap we cleared the edge, pounded across the road, and leaped down into the ashy dunes of the smoking land beyond.

  The nearest Silent One must have noticed our wild race across the open road, however, for a sensation of cold came upon us from behind in mid-leap, and I lost my grip on Dracaina’s mane. I fell and she fell also, sliding down a long slope of fine and choking ash, to lie in a motionless heap at the bottom.

  I lost my helm in the darkness, and there was no way to find it. My pomander, my lethal means of escape, was gone. My weapon, however, was not far away from my body, and I could find in the dark because of the tugging on my soul.

  When I could rise to my aching legs again, I slid and jumped and fell down that stinking ash pile, and was dirtied from head to toe. I touched my brother’s body with the haft of my Diskos, and felt a tremble of life-force still within.

  I prodded Dracaina, and offered her tablets of nutriment. There are techniques to be used on one who has been Touched by Invisible Force, but they would harm a monster like her. All I could do was stroke her soot-coated head and call her name.

  For I could not leave her. The Night Land was stirring; I coul
d not lift my brother. Without her strength, death was sure.

  And, yes, I must admit I admired the bravery and loyalty she had shown. How was it possible that a monster could be so true to a man? More true than Creon.

  She stirred, and opened her blood-red eye. I admit I recoiled from it, that horrible serpentine eye, its slit pupil swelling wide: a nocturnal eye. Only human eyes are not like that.

  At my urging she rose to her feet again, and again she knelt to me, and again let me mount.

  I was impressed at her unnatural strength and vitality. I began to see why my brother loved her.

  84.

  The mighty Voice of the Home-Call sounded once more above the dark land. The Lopsided Men loping after me now scattered, some digging in the sand to bury themselves, some throwing themselves on their spears, slaying themselves just like a man would.

  Dracaina paused in her graceful flight, and raised her monster head, nostril wide. The bristles on her back stirred and stood in my grip. She looked to the west.

  There is a broad table land, coated with a glacier, which rises high above the country to the north of the Vale of Red Fire, west of where we paused. The dark, cold upland was silhouetted against the strange, opaque blue fire which forever issues upward from the plains behind it, and the lights from the Vale of Red Fire played across its steep sides before it, making the crevasses and tumbling cliffs a breathing texture of red and black shadows.

  In that light I saw one of the Greater Powers move. It appeared at the top of the icy plateau, silhouetted against the blue glare behind. It was shaped like a hill of darkness, and surrounded by a black smoke or aura.