A cold fear clutched my heart. I could no longer detect the travelers with my Night Hearing, as if in passing into a Silence beyond understanding, they had simply ceased to exist. I suddenly longed for the normal noises of the Night Land—even for the far echoing thunder of the Great Laughter, or the whining from the southeast, where the Silver Fire Holes opened before The Thing That Nods—or the baying of the Hounds, or any of the dreadful things that normally passed through the Night Land. They could not have offended me as the silence did.
***
This was not the end of our sorrows concerning the lost youths, for a day later, during the ninth hour, we saw something that we had read about only in histories, though we dreaded that it might come.
Cartesius woke me from a sound sleep. Like the rest of the Monstruwacans, I was exhausted after my long vigil in the tower. I stumbled up, groggy as a drunkard, mumbling my questions while the Master urged me to haste. He did not take me immediately to the lifts, but led me to the nearest embrasure. Even before we reached it I felt an unusual stirring of the ether, unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
"Down there," he said, "just in front of The Circle."
I squinted at the plain below. Figures stood there, lined up as if in formation. I gasped and rushed to the nearest spyglass.
They stood in their armor, their diskoi by their sides, their faces pale and filled with anguish. Though I could not identify them by sight, I knew these were the lost youths.
"If only they had died," Cartesius said, his head in his hands.
They were ghosts, for their forms shone with a dull, gray light and wavered insubstantially, as if the barest wind—had there been any—might have disbursed them. I could partially see through them to the plain beyond. They gestured toward the pyramid, motioning for those within to come out. With my Night Hearing, I heard them calling, urging their parents to leave the safety of the redoubt.
When I told Cartesius, he said, "We know. The Instruments detected it. The Master of the Watch has already doubled the sentries at The Portal."
"What can I do?"
He looked bleakly into my eyes. "Perhaps with your Night Hearing you can tell us. Are these truly the souls of our children or an illusion sent to confuse us?"
I am an honorable man, but I wanted to lie at that moment, because I knew whatever I said would be reported in the Hour Slips. "It really is them. I don't understand their present state of existence, but they are suffering. I can feel it. They suffer as no living person has ever suffered before."
He nodded heavily. "I see." He turned away. "You can go back to bed. That is all I needed."
"Cartesius?"
He turned back.
"Don't tell them about the pain."
He nodded again and departed.
For three days the phantoms stood beckoning on the plain. When no one responded to their pleas, they abruptly vanished, never to be seen again. Though our scholars held many opinions on the matter, none really knew if those souls captured by Evil Forces remained eternal prisoners, were ultimately destroyed, or finally escaped to paradise. Whatever the case, those that had questioned the commander who had ordered the other youths slain questioned him no more.
***
All during the time we had watched the travelers upon the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk, I had occasionally sensed the thrilling of the ether and the beating of the Master Word, but it was always faint. Though I could not decipher Naani's messages, I tried to send back words of comfort.
When the ghosts vanished, I fell into deep despair, driven by my helplessness against the Forces and monsters of the Night Land. Not an hour went by without my thinking about Naani. I tried to find respite in calculations of geometric shapes, but even mathematics could not divert me.
Ever again the faint call came, but never Naani's voice speaking in my soul.
V
PREPARATION
The end of the slain youths and the seventeen hundred heroes came a few days later in the Country of Silence, the lowest of all the Underground Fields. It spread a hundred miles in every direction, with its domed roof arching three miles above, as if its builders possessed a racial memory of the sky. The history of the construction of the Country of Silence was recorded in seven thousand and seventy volumes, one for each of the years spent in its making. Like the great Egyptian pyramids, generations had lived, labored, and died without seeing the end of their work, but it had been shaped and hallowed as an act of love, rather than through the efforts of slaves. Seven moons, lit by the Earth Current, set in the dome in a circle sixty miles across, bathed the whole region in a soft, holy light. In such a place anyone could weep without shame.
In the center of the country stood a tall hill crowned by a huge dome covering the fissure from which the Earth Current poured; its golden light could be seen from anywhere in the land. A narrow path called The Last Road led up to the north side of the dome to a door named, simply, The Gateway.
Throughout the Country of Silence ran long roadways, winding past memorial statues and tablets. Temples of Rest, surrounded by the soft chatter of waterfalls, lay scattered along the roads. To walk alone in that land was to wander once more among the mysteries of childhood, and those who came there returned to their cities renewed, filled with peace.
In my boyhood, I had rambled weeks at a time through the Country of Silence, carrying food with me and sleeping among the memories, for my soul was drawn to the resting place of the heroes of the past. In the end, I always found myself standing on the Hills of the Infants, small rises where I could hear, above the noise of the bubbling fountains, a peculiar echo like a little child calling over the slopes. I never knew how this was done, but it must have been the work of a long-dead craftsman. The hills were covered with countless memory tokens dedicated to the infants who had died through the ages, and I often happened upon a mother, sitting alone or in the company of others, mourning her child.
Such was the quiet wonder, the holy splendor of that vast country, hallowed for generation after generation to memory, eternity, and the dead.
The people bore the bodies of the young warriors into the Country of Silence, and Cartesius and I, along with a hundred million others, came to honor their memory. The bearers placed the slain upon The Last Road. The road, which was actually a migrator, lumbered forward, carrying first the dead youths through The Gateway, then those who had given their lives to save them. As the first bodies vanished into the dome, we all fell silent until we heard, rising from the direction of the Hills of the Infants, a distant wailing like a rustling wind. We, in turn, took up the song, for it was the soft mourning of the entire multitude. The melody passed in a wave among the people, then ended in a profound silence as the last of the dead rode into the brilliant light of the dome, where they became one with the consuming fire of the Earth Current.
When they were gone, a memory token was placed in a triangular cluster for each of the slain, and a representative from every city that had lost one of the ten thousand rose and charged the pyramid's artists to create beautiful sculptures to their honored dead. Then the millions sang a song thousands of years old, a loud, triumphant hymn of honor, while the swelling of underground organs rose from the earth below, like thunder from the deep. The refrain reverberated through the Country of Silence, then fell away, leaving only faint echoes passing over us, dying in the distance.
With the ceremony done, the people drifted over the Country of Silence to visit the markers of their ancestors, before entering the lifts and returning to their cities.
***
There was no more talk of helping the people of the Lesser Redoubt after this, though the thought of Naani's people dying unaided only added to our sorrow. I realized then how foolish I had been in hoping that a secret expedition could rescue the inhabitants of the Lesser Redoubt. How often I had imagined stepping through the darkness to Naani, arms outstretched, our souls recognizing one another from ages past! But it was all nonsense. It haunted
me that my love might, at any moment, be suffering beneath the hand of a foul monster; I grew nearly mad with worry, and struggled against the urge to seize my diskos and rush into the night.
I often sent words of comfort and love to Naani, warning her not to be lured into leaving the safety of the redoubt by false messages, but it was a dreary effort, directing my thoughts into the darkness without ever hearing a response. Sometimes the ether stirred weakly around me, and I thought I caught the faint call of the Master Word. Though this gave me hope that Naani lived, it also kept me in a constant state of anxiety. Every day my heart grew more restless; life seemed vain and empty. I tried to throw myself into my work, and at night, when I could not sleep, I sat staring blindly at the formulas in Ayleos' Mathematics, gaping at them without understanding, too distracted to apply myself.
To add to my apprehensions, a voice disguised as Naani's began speaking to me, only to lose its power to respond when I gave the Master Word. It usually remained silent only a short while before calling again. This occurred time after time, both during the day and in the Hours of Sleep, until it nearly drove me to desperation. Regardless of how it tempted me, I refused to speak to it, fearing it might snare my soul. Its voice tainted my spirit; after its calls I found peace only through prayer, contemplation of noble tales, and thoughts of my sweet and holy love for Mirdath. Finally, I learned to rebuke it by sending the Master Word with all the strength of my will. Only then could I find a few hours of serenity.
I ate little and grew thin. With the comfort of my mathematics denied me, I found solace in vigorous exercise. During those times, my old life as Andrew seemed quite close, as if his pleasure in physical strength had become my own. I would run along the outer ring of the One Thousandth City until exhausted, then sprawl in a heap beside one of the embrasures. Only then would my mind be free. Cartesius chided me gently, but there was little he could say, and little I could do to change my longing. Finally, I suppose out of desperation, he suggested I search through the Records, to see if I could find anything useful.
I took to the task at once, as it put action to my anxiety. Cartesius helped me as well, both out of sympathy and from his natural thirst for knowledge. One day he brought me an ancient book plated in metal, with runes engraved upon its cover.
"I found this stored in a section of the library last visited ten thousand years ago," he said. "It is very old, a remarkable find. I've only read a bit of it, but enough to know its value. I intend to send copies to the scholars of every city, but I wanted you to see it first."
I took it gingerly, but found its pages, a remnant of a forgotten science, as fresh as the day they had been printed. Over the next few days I poured over its contents.
Much of it concerned a tale I had read before in various histories of the ancient world, a narrative most of the learned discounted as myth, though I had always liked such accounts, perceiving a yolk of truth within their outer shells. However, the version in the metal book was written in a different manner from any of the others, as if quoting from witnesses to the actual events. It told how, many eons before, tremors racked the world, opening a tremendous chasm a thousand miles long, so deep its bottom could not be seen. The oceans rushed into the rift with a power that shook the continents, and for weeks heavy mist and torrential rain brooded over the entire world. Toward the book's end, written in a style different from the first, it depicted a time countless centuries later, when the rift had become a huge chasm passing west to southeast, then turning north, a hundred miles deep and approximately a thousand miles each way. The sun shone in its western end, casting a red gloom down one leg of its length.
Though this seemed the stuff of romance, I, with my memory of the sunlit age, did not discount it so quickly. Instead, I theorized that one of our oceans must have been drawn into the fires at the earth's mantle, causing horrendous destruction.
The final author of the text lived in an even later time. The sun sputtered, and the surface of the earth grew cold and inhospitable, but the great chasm, tamed by the handling of eternity, had become a deep valley, large enough to hold seas and mountains, with beckoning forests and hills in places, and fire pits and poisonous clouds of sulphur in others. It was a primal world, given to warmth and life, with enormous beasts, the descendants of birds and mammals, dwelling in the forests.
Men struggled to survive during that time, and a hardy race of humans eventually descended into the valley. They were builders by nature—the book called them the Road Makers—for they constructed roads everywhere they went.
For many generations they built the roads downward, yet it took them centuries to reach the bottom of the valley. They fought and conquered the behemoths living there, then built cities, which they connected with their roads all the way to the north turning, which they called the Great Bight. Beyond the Bight, where the sun could not penetrate, lay darkness and shadow, but even that did not prevent them from continuing their roads far into the north, past fire pits rising from the earth's core. Eventually, however, the monsters dwelling in the shadows of the towering cliffs drove them back to the red glow of the western valley.
They returned to their cities, where they lived in peace for perhaps a hundred thousand years, growing ever wiser and more cunning, but in the end they dabbled in matters best left alone, and inadvertently opened a way for Forces from beyond our dimension to enter the world.
As the centuries passed, the sun waned until all lay in perpetual dusk. In those times, the twilight fell upon the people's souls as well, so they embraced depraved and shameful customs, and consorted with the Evil Forces. As a result, monsters from the west attacked many of the cities. An age of sorrow and struggle followed, which destroyed many, but refined the spirits of those who fought for good. A leader arose, Gosil of Geddon, who led the people in a war against the monsters and scattered them up and down the valley. Envisioning that the Forces of Evil would grow stronger with the coming of eternal night, Gosil conceived a plan to build a place of refuge.
Over many years, his people constructed a great house, meant to hold the world's millions, but the plan failed, for the structure could not protect the humans against the Forces of Evil. Gosil and his followers abandoned the house and journeyed farther south, where they built the Great Pyramid.
The Master Monstruwacan and I believed the words of the book. By its description, we knew that the surface world, lost a hundred miles up in the night, contained no life, for none could survive in that frozen desolation. We also assumed that the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk must have been built by the Road Makers, and that the House of Silence was the original sanctuary made by Gosil.
"According to the account, our pyramid was built in the southeast portion of the rift," Cartesius said, "just before the valley turns north at the Great Bight. That suggests Naani's pyramid must be either to the north or west. The road going to the Place Of The Ab-Humans might lead there."
"That isn’t where I would search first," I said.
"Legends suggest that something extraordinary lies in that direction."
"I know. But I'm almost certain the Lesser Redoubt is north of us. Naani's people claim their founders came from the south. It feels like she calls from the north."
Cartesius sighed. "A man might wander a thousand miles wrong and never find it. It's all too uncertain. We need more research. Surety through study, as we say."
"Not just study," I said. "Sometimes action must suffice."
The Master Monstruwacan shook his head, a touch of alarm in his eyes. "No, Andros. Not without more information. Do not even consider it. The darkness is too deep; it would swallow you up."
I fell into a brooding silence, the book lying open in my lap, thinking of those vast cliffs all around us, hidden by the darkness. Still, we had always assumed we lived in the depths of the world, though those who thought of such things generally believed the pyramid stood in the bed of an ancient sea, with its sides gradually sloping away from us. Myriad other theories existed
, of course, as is always the way when facing the unknown, but I trusted the account in the metal book. It was, at any rate, only the scholars who pursued such concepts; to the average person, the thought of the upper world, or of any other condition than that in which they lived, seemed mere fantasy. To them, everlasting night, distant figures, terrible monsters, fire-holes and Watchers—all the mysteries of the Night Land—were the normal way of things. Only children believed the ancient stories.
***
Despite Cartesius's counsel, from that moment I thought of nothing but going to find Naani. I finally made my decision when I awoke from a troubled sleep to the sound of her voice, anguished and beseeching.
Andros. Oh, Andros! Can't you help me, as you did when the three rogues attacked me? My Andros.
I sat up in bed and answered with the Master Word, which was returned, but almost too faint to hear.
Through a long hour, I called into the night. I sent her reassurance and begged to know what dangers she faced. I trembled with excitement; I was nearly beside myself, but I heard her voice no more, save for a weak murmuring of the ether.
"I will not wait!" I cried at last, raising my hands above my head, palms outward, tears rolling down my cheeks. "Upon my honor, I won't abide here while you perish. I will not wait!"
But the darkness gave no answer.
Knowing my course at last, I dressed swiftly and rushed to find the Master Monstruwacan. I woke him from a sound sleep, but he rose quickly. We sat together in his little study, he with his night robe about him, his ancient eyes filled with a dread I did not, at that moment, understand.
I told him what had occurred, ending with, "I won't suffer in silence any longer. I'm going into the Night Land, to either find Naani or meet a swift end to my torment."
"No, Andros," he said, his voice quavering as I had never heard it before. "No. You are overwrought. We will meet tomorrow and search the Records anew. We will seek other ways. We need more information. We must find the particulars. I know a room, filled with Records untouched by generations—we will look there. Yes. There are certain volumes—just sitting here I can think of a dozen. You should go to bed. I will rouse you early. We will find something soon. I’m certain of it."
The Night Land, a Story Retold Page 8
