by Ilsa J. Bick
“Captain, We’re Too Steep! We Won’t Be Able to Break Away!”
As if to confirm Glemoor’s words, Garrett felt her stomach drop in free fall as the ship took a sudden plunge, slammed from above by what felt like a solid belt of hypercharged particles and compressed gases.
“Captain, the gravity!” Bat-Levi shouted. The ship rocked, and the artificial gravity hiccupped enough to send her backpedaling on her heels, off-balance, and slamming into the guardrail. She wheeled around, clutching for support. “It’s sucking all the matter in this region toward the black hole!”
Garrett didn’t need her to spell out the rest. With the increased compression and electromagnetic winds, the ship would be slow to respond, like trying to turn on a dime in a pool of molasses.
Garrett whirled on her heel. “My ship, Mr. Castillo!” My ship: an age-old command, one used by pilots of planes, not starships, but Castillo needed no translation. He jumped to one side as Garrett leapt to the helm and activated first the starboard, then port thrusters.
“Forty degrees.” Glemoor threw a quick glance at his captain then back at his instruments. “Forty-five. Hull stress increasing, Captain. Approaching tolerance limits…”
“Captain, we’re close,” said Bat-Levi, “and if we pass too close to the gravity well…”
“Fifty!” shouted Glemoor, the Naxeran’s calm breaking at last. “Impulse power at three-quarters! Hull stress at tolerance! Captain!”
Almost there. Garrett blinked sweat from her eyes and winced at the sting. Come on, girl, come on, don’t let me down, don’t quit on me now.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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This book is for Dean Wesley Smith—editor, writer, mentor, colleague—and for David, with love, always.
Historian’s Note
This story is set in the year 2336, forty-three years after the presumed death of Captain James T. Kirk aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-B in Star Trek Generations, and twenty-eight years before the launch of the Enterprise-D in “Encounter at Farpoint.”
Prologue
Ishep was dreaming, and that should have been a mercy because bad dreams always end. Then Ishep would have awakened and known that this was all in his head.
In his dream, his father, the Night King, wasn’t in his tomb deep underground in a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the Red Mountains, and Ishep should have been happy. In his dream, there should have been bright sunlight and grass so green and beautiful his heart hurt—and there was, and it did—and he should have stood with his father by the shores of a deep, clear lake that was clean and still—and he did, because Ishep, who was a bastard, had loved his father more than Prince Nartal, who was First Son and a coward, ever had. But Ishep knew everything was wrong, and it was as if his dream knew that, too. In the next instant, the sky melted, and the lake turned to stone, but Ishep’s heart still hurt because his father, the Night King, was dead.
He saw then that his father had no eyes. The worms had eaten them. One worm that was very thick and clotted with black blood oozed from the hole where his father’s right eye had been and slithered down his father’s cheek, leaving a single, glistening trail like that of a tear. The skin over his father’s face was brown and tight as old leather with age and decay, and flaps hung in tatters like torn curtains because the bones of his skull had ripped through as easily as…well, as easily as sharp bone slices through wasted skin thinner than paper.
Yet, as Ishep watched, his father moved, shuddered…then groaned. The naked white bone of his jaw unhinged, and his mouth dropped open. For a wild moment, Ishep thought that maybe it was all a mistake and his father wasn’t dead after all and Prince Nartal hadn’t left Ishep behind, lost and alone, in the tombs, but that this was some horrible game because this is a dream, it has to be a dream, I don’t want to die down here. But then his father vomited—no, no, something thick as a man’s arm and milky like the bloated belly of a rotted fish bulged and writhed in his father’s mouth, like a fat, obscene tongue. The thing spooled out from the dark place inside his father and drooled over his jaw, and Ishep saw the thing’s muscles undulate and ripple like waves beneath its too-white scales.
And then it looked at Ishep. Its dead eyes were flat and dull as gray slate. Ishep saw that it had the head of a woman, and all in a rush he understood that he stared into the face of Death itself, into the eyes of Uramtali, Goddess of the Well of Souls, and he knew then that he would die. But he could only watch, in horror, as her skin split open with a loud ripping sound, like cloth being torn in two, and then she didn’t have a face anymore: just a skull, and teeth curved and sharp as white knives.
Her voice, in his head: Are you afraid?
And Ishep, so terrified his heart pushed in his throat: Yes, yes!
Good—her knife-fangs parted, and her mouth gaped open until there was nothing else but the darkness in her throat that was a shaft into which Ishep tripped and began a fall that would last until time itself ceased, and that was forever—because you should be.
Screaming, Ishep woke.
The tomb was pitch black. His scream echoed, bounced off stone, then died. Ishep pushed up on his hands, his blood thumping in his ears. His sandals rasped upon cold stone, and the rock bit into the thin, sensitive skin of his thighs. He listened, but other than the hitching of his breath there was no other sound, not even the faint sizzle of candles guttering—a sound like frying meat—and that was because the candles had burned out. Darkness flowed over him, and when he moved, it was like swimming in thick black water. Although he was cold and stiff from sleeping on stone, his face was hot, and when he brought a hand up to his cheek, he felt the dried salt track of tears.
I’m still here. Moaning, Ishep jammed his fist into his mouth to keep from crying out. I’m still here and I’m going to die down here and no one will ever find me, no one will know that they’ve sealed me in by mistake, and my mother, oh, my mother…
His thoughts stuttered to a halt. Something was different, and Ishep seized on this because it gave him something other to do than wait to die of thirst in the tomb of a dead king. The darkness felt different, almost as if he’d been moved. Walked in his sleep? Maybe. His father’s tomb had two other rooms besides the main burial vault, and he remembered that he’d fallen asleep next to the carved stone edifice of his father’s bier. There was treasure all around the reliquary—piles of gem-encrusted goblets and fat yellow discs of gold coin fanning from chests of fine blackwood. But now when he patted the floor, his fingers grazed against icy rock, and nothing else. Nothing here—blindly, Ishep crept upon his hands and knees, pausing to sweep his arms in wide arcs—no treasure, nothing, I must be in one of the other rooms, but which one, where am I, what’s happening?
And then his hands found something smooth and cool: wood. But not a chest—breath hissing through his teeth, Ishep sat back on his heels and ran his fingers up and down—no, this was something tall and slender, with three sides. A pedestal. He stood, his palms following the graceful taper of the wood until he came to the flat, triangular surface, and his fingers slid against something cold and metallic.
There was a soft, perceptible click.
Ishep started, gasped, snatched his fingers away as if he’d been burned. He waited, eyes bulging, heart knocking against his ribs.
The darkness began to dissolve. A sharp cry ripped from Ishep’s mouth, and he stumbled back as the light bloomed: not like the sudden flare of a torch, but as if the light from one of the world’s two moons had lost its way and come here, far underground. The light melted the darkness, and then Ishep saw that the room was bare except for a pedestal of ebony bloodwood. On the dais lay a silver mask.
The mask had no markings and Ishep saw immediately that it would cover his face from his brow to his upper lip. The mask was bathed in a silver glow: a bolt of light that beat down from somewhere high above. Ishep shielded his eyes but couldn’t find the source. Then, suddenly, the light intensified, flooding over the dais and spilling to the floor. The light was alive—like the thing in my dream, coming from my father’s mouth!—and it slithered along the floor in thick tongues that puddled like silver water.
Ishep’s mind screamed: Get out, get out, run! But his body wouldn’t obey, and where was there to run anyway?
Then a voice brushed against his mind: Come here.
Ishep’s blood iced. What? No, no, he wouldn’t! But even as his own mind protested, he felt a firm, steady pressure tugging at his brain, as if something had hooked in fingers of pure steely thought and begun to pull. No—he struggled to break free—he mustn’t, he had to run, he had to…
Come here.
Incredibly, Ishep started forward, his movements as jerky as a puppet whose strings have gotten tangled.
Pick it up. The voice was a whisper, and yet it was so strong. Put it on.
“No,” Ishep moaned even as he reached for the mask. His fingers slid over the metal, and he was surprised that the mask wasn’t cold now but warm as blood.
Do it. Now.
“No,” Ishep said, as he slipped the mask onto his face. The metal curled; the edges grasped the skin of his face like greedy, clutching fingers. “No, please!”
A bolt of pain sizzled through his body. Ishep screamed. It was as if someone had poured hot, molten metal into his body. Fire coursed through his veins and licked at his heart; his brain exploded with a sudden white-hot flash that seared his mind.
Now. Turn around. Move.
And then somehow—Ishep didn’t know how, because he was burning up, he was dying, and there was something crowding into his mind, his body—Ishep was back in the main vault, and he was standing over his father, the dead Night King. The vault was still dark, though Ishep could just make out the hump of his father’s body.
Through the roaring in his ears, Ishep heard the rustle of cloth against stone, a sound like the feet of mice skittering over sand. And then his father moved, and his body began to glow.
What was left of Ishep wailed in terror.
The king’s mouth opened. Tendrils of something—the dream, my dream!—like luminous coils of thick white smoke billowed out, twisting and writhing. The coils mingled; they met; they coalesced and assumed a shape, now a woman, then a serpent, now a naked eyeless skull.
Suddenly, Ishep was aware of movement, a rush of air. Specters pulsed and streamed into the chamber, issuing from the walls like fog rising from a still pond. Ishep recognized the shapes of gods and goddesses, and strange chimeras that were part-beast, part-man, part-woman. They were as amorphous and indistinct as clouds shifting beneath a hot sun. And then the woman-thing, the one that had issued from his father’s mouth, gave a great cry and spread its wings and leapt into the mass of roiling shapes. The others closed around the woman-thing the way a man’s arms might encircle a lost lover, and in another moment, Ishep saw the woman-thing dissolve; and then, in his mind, Ishep heard the gabble of their voices—or maybe it was their thoughts because he knew there was no sound. Ishep sensed one voice detach itself from the rest, as if it had decided to step aside from a large crowd. The voice was clear and strong and rang through his brain with the clarity of a single, solitary bell.
You are not chosen. The voice-thought—a woman’s—paused then walked its spectral thought-fingers over the nooks and crannies of Ishep’s mind, as if searching for something. You are not Night. There is Night within you, but…
The woman’s voice-thought trailed away, as if considering what to do next.
Ishep knew, without knowing how he knew, that the voice-thought was talking about the prince, Nartal. Nartal was Night, the prince of a Night King from a line of Night Kings. Nartal had been bred for Night, bred to carry the soul of an Immortal, a dithparu.
And then, quite suddenly, Ishep ceased being afraid. Beneath the mask, Ishep felt a strange pressure, like that of hands molding clay, and he knew that he was being kneaded into something new and wholly alien. But he wasn’t afraid. Why? How odd…Ishep searched his emotions, turning over the secret places of his heart the way a child tips over rocks for bugs. No, he wasn’t afraid, and he should have been. Instead of fear, there were other emotions: regret for his mother, though she was moving far away in his thoughts now, growing smaller and more distant, a memory that would soon be lost in the mists of time. There was anger at Prince Nartal, that coward, for slinking away after the rest of the funeral procession had left. But, most of all, there was sadness, and grief. Because Ishep knew that he was dying, and there was nothing he could do but watch his life slip away.
The woman’s—Uramtali’s—voice-thought again: Why are you here?
Ishep said, out loud, “I love my father, and I followed the procession here, and then I hid because I wanted to see an Immortal, a dithparu, being born. Only now I don’t know the way out because Nartal left and I got lost.”
Then, more boldly and with sudden inspiration: “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it? The princes have always stayed behind, because they’re supposed to carry a dithparu from the Well of Souls, that’s what they say.”
That’s true. Now…As Ishep watched, the whirling spirit-shapes bunched, shifted. We have to think what to do next. A pause, then: Maybe you.
Then, as the thing’s thought-fingers wriggled deeper into the crevices of his mind, it was as if its thoughts and Ishep’s merged, and then Ishep knew the truth.
They’re just spirits, and that’s all they are. Ishep grappled after the thought, tried to hang onto it. They’re Immortals, but they need a body, a certain kind of body, a body bred for Night. Only then, for some reason, they have to return here, because this is the place where they live; they can’t leave this place on their own. But now Nartal’s broken the line and now everything will change. They’ll never get out anymore, because only Nartal knew the way out, they don’t know the way, because they’re spirits and they can’t know, and now they’re trapped here until time stops, and that’s forever…
Something was happening to the spirit-shapes. As Ishep stared, one portion of the mass seemed to bud, then separate itself from the rest. The figure hovered before Ishep, congealing like cooling glass into something recognizable: a snake with the head of a woman that shifted to a skull then back again, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind what it was, or would become. The woman’s face, when it was a face, had ridges encircling the brows and tracking down the neck on either side, and the ridges had scales, just as the snake’s body did below the woman’s waist. The woman’s hair was sleek and seemed to have a life of its own, falling in undulating, liquid black waves along its shoulders. Yet the woman’s eyes were cold and flat and the color of slate. The woman-snake—now woman, now skull, now vapor—floated before Ishep, and Ishep saw a welter of emot
ions chase across its ever-changing features before settling into one that Ishep instantly recognized: hunger.
“Uramtali,” Ishep whispered, his voice breaking. “Are you Uramtali?”
If you like. Prince Nartal was Night. The woman-snake pulsed and grew and reared above Ishep, her clawed fingers unfurling, spreading. But you are the son of a Night King and there is Night in you. Just enough. Then: Would you like to see your father again?
Ishep remembered the woman-thing that had joined the other spirit-shapes. Not his father, of course. These spirit-shapes were the Immortals, the dithparus. His father’s soul was mortal, and so his father was gone, his spirit vanishing along with his last breath.
Still, Ishep said, “Yes.”
Good. Are you afraid?
With a languid movement, Ishep shook his head. A strange warm torpor seized him, as if he were very young and been given too many goblets of wine, and suddenly, he was very sleepy.
Good-bye, Mother. Ishep felt his soul streaming away. His knees buckled. Good-bye.
Aloud, he said only, “No. I’m not afraid.”
In the last instant of his life, Ishep saw something very much like regret flicker in the woman-snake’s cold flat eyes.
You should be, she said, gathering herself. You should be.
And then Ishep screamed—but not for long.
Dawn ate away the night. In the palace, Nartal hid, waiting until the appointed hour when he would emerge and claim his place as the newly anointed Night King, bearing the soul of an Immortal. Except it was a lie, and it was the beginning of an end so far in the future that neither Nartal nor anyone else could possibly imagine it.
Far beneath the skin of this world, in a place where men from distant planets would not walk for another 6,000 years, the boy who had been Ishep sat. Ishep—the boy—was gone. Only the shell of his body, and the thing that was immortal, remained. Above, the world would spin on its axis, and the two suns would rise and set, but things would change, and very soon, because the world needed the Immortal in its shell to tend to the machines and make the light globes float. But the Immortal Uramtali—the dithparu—was trapped. So the world would break, and here was the supreme irony: For all its great powers, the thing was not a mind reader, and only Prince Nartal knew the way out.
