Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  118.

  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.

  119.

  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 f
illed 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.

  I leaped to my feet, aghast. The non-earthly servants of the Northwest Watching Thing had made a way for its earthly servants to pass. A corridor for the abhumans had been decreed. Such cooperation had been known to exist among the Night Land at some eons of time and not among others.

  Something stealthy must have seen me rise to unwarily to my feet, and decided to stalk no longer, but rush. Immediately I heard noises in the dark to one side of me; I fled the other way, as quickly as stealth allowed.

  The noise grew dim behind me. This place was all shadows, for the light from the plains below did not reach. In the dark I turned to the cliffwall and climbed it, I could not see the cliff with my eyes, but the discipline I had used to clear my soul from the influences of the Lesser Dome allowed me to know this earth as if it were part of me, for this rock here was not desecrated by the Blue Fire.

  There was a roar from behind. I glanced over my shoulder. Far below, beyond the edge the ash-heaps and volcano-spew of normal earth I saw, all at once, the corridor of darkness where there was no flame vanished. I assume it required some energy unknown to this our normal condition of time and space either to create the blue fire or to draw it back; and that whatever had been damming or quenching the flame had shattered.

  When the two walls of fire crashed together, they sent up a white dazzle of forked lightning reaching upward three or four hundred feet above the plain, blinding and terrible. In that gruesome and shadowless burst of light I could see the cliff; I was but a little yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks.

  The light was splashing against the height where I was, but nothing was visible below me. Like the echo of a low mocking chuckle floating through the night, my brain elements detected a sensation of hunger, a desire to break my bones between long red teeth, and sensation of dry, sarcastic humor.

  With my brain elements, I also sensed another band of them, crowching low and running on their knuckles, rushing along the ridge of the volcano crater lip, trying to reach me. The ones below me, I could now hear with my ears, were leaping with simian agility from rock to rock to come at me.

  Desperately I scrambled upward. I found myself in one of the worst fighting positions imaginable.

  The lip of the dead volcano was like a ridge of fangs, uneven underfoot, treacherous with ice and pebbles, and the obsidian rock was slick. The place to put my feet was no wider than a cubit. A sudden terrible drop to the blue plain was to my one hand. The other hand was like a bowl of shadow, for I could not see if the drop were sudden or gentle, which led to the floor of the volcano crater. In that moment, how I yearned to see it! (It is an odd thing that the black and cracked rock of the mouth of volcano would seem normal, even homely, to me then; but I had just walked through the land of the pale blue flame, and seen the trembling dust and strangely shaped white rocks which writhe and glow beneath the curtains of blue energy.)

  I could hear footfalls as abhumans came toward me along this narrow pathway, drawn by the sound of my breathing, the heat of my blood. I measured the sound of their approach with my ear, and I knew I could not outrun them, not on this brink. There was no point in stealth.

  The Diskos gave forth a terrible low roar very cheering to my ear, and in that flash of bright light from the spinning disk, I saw the terrified and astonished eyes of the first of the abhumans, much closer than I had thought, as the blade almost of its own accord leaped on in its telescoping haft and slashed him neatly through the throat. His head went toppling one way and his body the other. Here a miracle of luck occurred, for I heard the toppling body strike one of the climbing shapes who at the same time were closing in on me from below, and he screamed as he fell, and his comrades tittered and coughed with laughter. Through the corner of my eye, I saw the falling bodies, one headless and one not, outlined against the weird blue fire of the plain below, and saw them disintegrate.

  The next one behind him was not so rash, but hooted and smiled, waiting for his comrade below to rise up and strike at my legs. I clove his skull in twain with a mighty overhand sweep of my weapon, and the smiling one lunged at me, trying to take me around the body with his powerful arms, or sink his fangs into my neck. His teeth slid against my neck armor without finding purchase.

  We both fell.

  I must have been within sight of the Last Redoubt, for in the ether all about me, I heard a great gasp and roar of alarm, as all the gathered hopes and fears of the millions of watching souls back there saw me slip down out of sight.

  My armor clanged and banged around me as I cartwheeled down the slope, and the lanyard around my wrist sent my Diskos whirling in huge white circles of crackling fire around me. My Diskos, confused, extended itself to full length, so that the blade was away from my body as I tumbled down the slope.

  It was utter darkness here. No light from the Blue Pain, no illumination from the Last Redoubt, not even the weird glow of the Seven Lights from the Black Hills touched my eye. The walls of the volcano blocked all.

  The slope was steep and grew less steep. My armor protected me from the worst of the fall, for no bones were broken. The headlong fall turned into a tumble, and then into a long slide across some form of slice rock.

  The Diskos blade had stopped spinning during the fall, and so it was as utterly dark as if I were blind. It was only because I could feel the health of the balls of my eye with my mind that I knew I was hale. I came to my feet, and a groan and a gasp escaped me
.

  The abhuman had not only survived the fall and landed near me, but had kept his wits, for when I made that involuntary noise of pain, I felt the rush of his attack through the air nearby. I swung the Diskos one-handed, an awkward blow. The weapon was still at his full extension. There was no flare, no noise, since I struck with the insulated part of the haft, but I must have struck the soft parts of his lower belly, for he lost his footing in the dark. I heard a yelp and a splash and cold water drenched me.

  I lit the blade. There was a shout from above, and I heard the noise of roars, and the crash of many bodies falling. Without turning my head to look, I knew what had happened: the abhumans, with their typical hatred for their own crooked lives, had flung themselves down the slope after me, willing to risk that headlong fall if only for a chance to slay one of the men who retained the form and features of the earlier world.

  Before me, in the light of that weapon, I saw the abhuman, a great brute dressed only in his own shaggy hide, climbing out of the waters of a lake were he had fallen. Over eons moisture from the upper air had somehow gathered as dew along the inner lip of the crater, and there must have been lingering heat underfoot in the rocks of the lake bottom, for it had not turned to ice.

  There must have been other abhumans who had not flung themselves down the slope. In the darkness above and behind me, some man-beasts must have been able to see us: and I heard hisses and grunts in their language as they called out smirking advice, sardonic japes and deprecations to their unbeloved comrade. From his eyes I could see he was not comforted by their calls.

  At that same moment, I felt in my soul a profound chill, and I knew it was some force from the House of Silence breathing courage and inhuman intelligence into this degenerate beast-man. He backed away into the waters, where were not deep in that place, and circled to my left and leaping to the shore.