Requies Dawn

by J L Forrest

  REQUIES DAWN

  a novel

  J.L. FORREST

  Requies Dawn. Copyright © 2017 by J.L. Forrest. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the Robot Cowgirl Press, Denver, Colorado:

  info@robotcowgirl.com.

  Books I and II of Eternal Requiem (Requies Dawn, Requies Day, and Requies Dusk), originally published under a single title–A Requiem Dawn—in 2014 by the Robot Cowgirl Press.

  Second Edition. Kindle. Published by the Robot Cowgirl Press.

  http://robotcowgirl.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Design and Cover by Forstå and Shana Cordon.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  Stories and Books

  by J.L. Forrest

  Read stories and books by J.L. Forrest on Amazon.

  Visit jlforrest.com.

  DELICATE MINISTRATIONS: Short Fictions I

  Eleven short stories of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy, including Liminal, a novella of the centuries to come.

  MINUSCULE TRUTHS: Short Fictions II

  Ten short stories of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy. Includes "Sapience Signified", a novelette of interstellar discovery, originally appearing in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

  WHEN THE WORLD ENDS: A Novella of Old Gods, New Gods, and a Stunning Vision of the Future.

  For who we were.

  Foreword

  In 2014, the first edition of A Requiem Dawn was published by the mysterioso co-op house known as the Robot Cowgirl Press. I am quite happy, now, to see Robot Cowgirl revisit the Requiem stories, this time with major adjustments and all apologies to dear readers who may have purchased the 600-page behemoth which was that novel.

  Things have changed—slightly.

  The first “part” of A Requiem Dawn was roughly 74,000 words, by itself, with another 80,000 words belonging to the remainder of the book. One hundred fifty-four thousand words was, for our purposes, simply too long. Worse, while A Requiem Dawn was received generously, the story in my opinion felt rushed, and its development suffered—600 pages actually needed to be 1,000.

  Not one book, but three.

  Nyahri et Sultah and Sultah et Nyahri deserve no less.

  In that same year, Analog Science Fiction and Fact chose to publish a novelette titled “Sentience Signified”. (Grammarians can argue with me about the use of that last period on my website: jlforrest.com or at facebook.com/jlforrest.) Contracted in 2014, “Sentience Signified” earned my entrance into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA, and it appeared in bookstores for the May 2015 edition. That story now appears in the collection Minuscule Truths, under the title “Sapience Signified” because, damn it, the title really was wrong.

  Similarly, the title to A Requiem Dawn wasn’t quite correct either. The word requiem is Middle English and comes from the Latin requies, all those vowels in the second syllable pronounced something like the eese in geese.

  In English, we’ve come to think of the requiem as an act of remembrance or, more specifically, as a musical composition in remembrance for the dead. This overarching series of books retains the title Eternal Requiem. The individual novels, however, are now titled Requies Dawn, Requies Day, and Requies Dusk. (There may even be a Requies Night—time will tell). Requies means here, more broadly, rest or repose—perhaps in death, but perhaps in some other sense.

  I will leave it to you, the reader, to decide what the themes of the Eternal Requiem might be. Like so many writers, I fear I’ve only struck an inch beneath the surface, and you’ll see through the smoke and mirrors immediately. All writing is, after all, little more or less than legerdemain.

  As a last note: In October 2016, Analog kindly published a novelette, by the title of “Progenesis”, which is a prequel of sorts for the Eternal Requiem. In case you’re unable to find out-of-date copies of Analog, you’ll be able to read “Progenesis” in Peculiar Declarations, my third collection of short fiction, due out in late 2018.

  J.L. Forrest

  Mt. Princeton, Colorado

  2017

  A Note on Languages

  The languages of Nyahri’s world—following the Eventide, the life blooms of the Hive, and the recovery of humanity—are necessarily simplified as presented here; e.g., Rosian isn’t Russian. At a time so far removed from our own, the common languages of the E’cwnii, Inwnii, and Oudwnii would be only a vague mishmash of contemporary languages, influenced by the tongue of the Atreianii, which is itself a blend of English, Italian, and other language structures. Given the length of the recovery after the Eventide, languages would have diversified more than this tale can allow. Sometimes storytelling prefers simplicity.

  For the most part, pronunciations are also simplified, except where they steal from contemporary and historical sources (e.g., Gjørg or Kepler). A few of the more common letters are:

  a: A soft ah, as in the word soft.

  c: A hard k, as in the word kleptomaniac.

  dh: A soft d, pronounced with the tongue tip just behind the upper teeth.

  e: A soft e, as in the word elevator.

  i: A soft i, as in the word tin, except at the end of nouns, where it follows the rules for singular and plural forms.

  i: (singular noun) At the end of many Atreian-influenced nouns, the singular i is pronounced as a hard e sound, as in the double e of the word tree.

  ii: (plural noun) At the end of Atreian-influenced plural nouns, the double ii is drawn out with the tongue at the back of the mouth. The change is not one of type but of length and accent. The practiced speaker and listener would know precisely whether an individual specimen was referenced, as opposed to the plural. Sometimes this can occur in names: Sabi is from the Atreian word meaning a single falcon; Marii is from the Atreian word for a multiplicity of seas, meaning “all waters.”

  j: A soft j, as in the second g of the word gorge.

  o: A short o, as in the word home.

  u: A rounded pronunciation of the double o, as in moon.

  w: A soft pronunciation of the double o, as in coo, drawn out longer than a single u.

  y: When at the beginning of a word, it is a hard e sound, as in the first e of the word concede. Within a word, it is a hard i sound, as in the word pie.

  §

  Examples

  Sultah yw Sabi is pronounced Sŭ•ltă ū Să•bē. (Yw combines from ē and oo and shortens merely to ū.)

  Nyahri is pronounced Nī•ăr•ē. Nyahri is from the E’cwn word for antelope or gazelle.

  Dhaos is pronounced Dhă•ōs.

  Atreiani is pronounced Ăt•rā•ăn•ē. (The ei combine to form a nasal e as in the English hey.)

  Book I of the

  Eternal Requiem

  Requies Dawn

  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

  With my lost saints—I love thee with the breath,

  Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,

  I shall but love thee better after death.

  Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

  {01}

  Risky to light a flame where enemies might spot it, but Nyahri kindled a small fire to offer herbs and dried venison to the Atreian devils and the hosts of the E’cwn gods. She plucked night-falcon feathers from her braided hair and cast them to read her foolish cousin’s fortune—Suhto, proud Suhto, the feathers said, doomed from the start.

  The night deepened and, at moments, the triplet moons hid their cold faces behind clouds. Called Lwn,
the largest waxing- crescent moon shed a frigid glow, overwhelming her pallid little sisters. In that light the violet-shaded foothills silhouetted the lower boar-back hills of the Abswyn range.

  After making her offerings, Nyahri tamped out the embers. She led Suhto’s black stallion and her russet, Kwlko, to a hilltop overlooking the Red Valley and the pinnacle of Abswyn, House of Hell. She fussed over the horses, checking their hooves and teeth and ribs, healthy as they were, anything to distract herself. Over many hours she refused sleep, at last sitting on the ground with her stallion’s saddle behind her.

  Why must I be so stubborn? she thought. Why must he be so stubborn? If I had found a way to make him understand, we would not be here. Her thoughts circled, If I had accepted his offer, we would not be here either.

  The marriage, though, would never have lasted.

  So here we are, she thought, and maybe I have killed him with stubbornness?

  At daybreak she crawled to the hillock which overlooked a sandstone valley. Two days before, Suhto crossed the valley and entered Abswyn, past the colossal stones of the red Gate, where no one should go. Midday passed without sign of him and, at last, sleep overcame her.

  When she woke again in the late afternoon, she stared across the valley as far as the pine-blanketed foothills. Would Suhto run toward her, his smile proving he’d won her challenge? Yet he appeared nowhere in that hallowed place, that cradle of the dead.

  At the center of the valley the devils’ slender pinnacle jutted a thousand handspans straight into heaven, though at its base it measured no more than five paces wide. A beacon glowed at its gray point, an unhurried white-red light which pulsed eternally.

  A tower built by devil-gods, Nyahri thought, an aeon ago, a place where good men and women do not go, a forbidden place.

  Dusk came, the moons scarcely brighter than the night before. At next light she sipped water, not wanting to blink in case she missed some sign. Nyahri kept her eyes open through most of the day but, with warm afternoon sun on her back and grass against her cheek, she closed her eyes again.

  ◆◆◆

  With her heart in her throat, Nyahri woke to a violent shrill, her skull rattling. The din centered upon the devils’ pillar, and it filled her ears, a noise made solid. Both horses neighed, bucked, and circled on their tethers. She fought to saddle them and mounted the stallion.

  Then the shrill quieted, replaced by a deep, earthen hum. The horses attempted retreat, eastward from Abswyn toward the open plains. Instead, Nyahri drove the stallions west, riding downhill. The sun, nestling against the foothills, blinded her even as the Abswyn tower loomed overhead, its light no longer pulsing but flickering.

  She rode over the flat, between sandstone cliffs which cast shades of rust and dried blood. Nyahri galloped through the bone-laden bowers of her ancestors. For a hundred generations, the E’cwnii had laid their dead at Abswyn, and now she desecrated their remains, knocking bones from their places, crushing others under hoof.

  Nothing like this, Nyahri thought, has ever happened before.

  Below the tower, the great mass of the devil-gods’ home hid beneath the earth, only its uppermost shell at the surface. Nyahri directed the horses across its vitreous metal, an unyielding gray roof exposed piecemeal through the quaking red sands.

  She returned to a familiar mesquite-rimmed draw—where she’d left Suhto to his challenge—and Nyahri scrambled from the saddle. An erosion revealed a glassy wall and a single rounded door, an entrance into this House of Hell. At the start of Suhto’s challenge, it had shut behind him.

  Now it stood open.

  “Suhto!” Nyahri screamed until her throat burned. “Suhto!”

  The earth-shake worsened. Choking dust washed the valley in a bloody haze.

  Soon the horses will run. Nyahri turned back to the stallions, but she found more than horses. Her stomach fell.

  A woman stood before her.

  Not a woman, Nyahri thought. A devil.

  A hand taller than the tallest E’cwn men, her hair blacker than the darkest E’cwn hair, the devil appeared humanlike but could never pass for human. Her opalescent skin glinted, human-like but for her coloring, for the long litheness of her arms and legs, for her slender fingers.

  The devil staggered toward Nyahri, catching the stallion’s reins. She clutched a large bag to her chest, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, a smear of dust crossing her forehead. The devil blinked, then spoke a few incomprehensible words.

  “I do not understand,” Nyahri said.

  The devil tilted her head, adjusting some thought, some perception. She uttered other words with different sounds.

  “I am sorry,” said Nyahri, “I do not speak your language, Atreiani.”

  Another tilt of the head, an adjustment. The devil tried another speech, another language entirely. In succession she attempted idiom after idiom, recombining tones and grammars, all the while gesturing to the horses.

  At last the devil’s words carried meaning: “You understand me, girl?”

  “Yea.” Nyahri nodded.

  “I’ve never ridden a horse, but if we don’t flee fast as we’re able, we’re dead. Understand?”

  “You are an Atreiani?”

  The devil blinked. “Yes.”

  “Gods!” Nyahri covered her mouth, raising her other hand in a sign against evil.

  “No time for superstitious bullshit,” the devil said, her voice urgent but trembling. “We’ve half an hour. Get us out of here.”

  Nyahri pointed to the subterranean orifice, to the crimson lights pulsing from it. “My cousin! He is inside the House of Hell—”

  “No man’s left alive down there.”

  Tears flooded Nyahri’s eyes. She shook her head, willing Suhto to exist.

  “I must get him!” Nyahri screamed.

  “Try and you’re dead too,” the devil said.

  Is that a threat? Nyahri wondered. An explanation?

  “Nay—”

  “Listen!” the Atreiani said, her accent thick. “We go now or we’re both dead.”

  Nyahri tried to understand. Why will we be dead? How is Suhto dead?

  “I’ve never ridden a horse,” the devil repeated.

  “What?”

  The Atreiani took another pained step. Nyahri reached to steady the devil’s arm but at the last moment withdrew, fear besting her urge to assist, to serve an obvious divinity.

  “Aid me!” the devil said, grabbing Nyahri’s wrist, the Atreiani’s skin as smooth as sun-warmed, polished stone.

  Her hair drank the sunlight, no rays reflecting from it. Her gaze fixed upon Nyahri, the devil’s coal irises encircling black pupils, depthless but for a grieving panic.

  Nyahri shuddered. A viper’s eyes, but something more.

  The horsewoman helped the Atreiani to the black stallion’s saddle. She strapped the devil’s bag to the cantle, jumped onto her own horse, and the stallion bolted. Nyahri drove the horses across the Red Valley till they frothed, passing between the red stones of the Gate. They charged into the forests at the feet of the boar-backed hills, leaving the hell-spire behind, following long arroyos and cottonwoods to lower ground. The earthen hum quieted. A thousand strides fell behind the riders, then two thousand, then three, until only hoof beats sounded on the leaf litter. Nyahri looked over her shoulder: the hollow-cheeked devil slumped, clutching the blanket and saddlebow.

  She possesses strength though, Nyahri thought, and she will not fall. How beautiful she is, gods protect us! An Atreiani, one of the old ones, the enslavers who bring blessings and destruction.

  The sun fell beneath the horizon—but in a flash the fledgling darkness seared into reborn light. The west erupted to heaven with Abswyn’s death-throws, a mushroom of fire silhouetting the foothills and boar-backs and trees. The air boomed, carrying an ashen cloud faster than any horse, throwing everything before it, razing trees, lifting stones.

  Another explosion followed, then another. The horses screamed and a shoc
kwave threw Nyahri from the saddle. She tumbled, clambering to grasp anything. Her head struck the ground. Then nothing.

  {02}

  Dreamless, Nyahri lay beneath the ash, the taste of dust and fire on her tongue. Her memories echoed, the passing of hours, the spilling of moments:

  Days before, the firm winds caressed the open prairie east of Abswyn, the plains’ golden horizon upholding a generous blue sky. Armies of giant grasses marched, sweeping unbroken except by a half-empty arroyo whose goliath cottonwoods shaded a creek. Locusts droned in the afternoon heat, and crickets trilled beside cool currents, where silverfish danced.

  Nearby, low-domed hide tents squatted in a clearing, hedged by scrub oaks, hidden from a distance. Cooking fires unfurled aromatic white smoke, drying venison strips on woven willow stands. Boys and girls kicked a leather ball between them, tumbling and colliding. They ran naked or dressed in simple cloth, their skin tinted in hues from tea leaves to burnt sienna.

  A mottled dog lay in the shade beside men who wore their earth-dark hair in tight braids. Night-falcon plumage fluttered from the longspears braced across their laps.

  The dog raised its head, cocked its ears, and ran to the water.

  Riders approached the opposite bank, young men standing in the saddle with their longspears held high, their bows slung at their backs, quivers at their sides. They crossed the river and dismounted, clasping arms with adolescent boys who accepted the reins of the sweat-lathered horses.