Of Darkness and Dawn (The Elder Empire: Shadow Book 2)

by Will Wight

  In place of a mouth or mandibles, it had what looked like a long tongue, which brushed the ground in front of it, but that wasn't its most distinctive feature. What stood out the most were its eyes.

  The creature's head was bare and smooth; all of its eyes rested on stalks positioned on its back. One of them was multifaceted, of the type you would normally see on a fly if you looked closely, but another had the vertical slit of a reptile's. Another had a blue iris, and it swiveled to look the human in the face as the creature moved closer.

  There were six eyes in total, and between them, more legs. Actually, he supposed these would be arms. Another set of ten limbs on top instead of on the bottom, triple-jointed and flexible, each tipped with a claw that spastically grasped the air. Some of the claws ran along the sides and ceiling of the corridor, as though keeping the creature balanced.

  Once the human catalogued the monster's features, he tightened his grip on the bone dagger. Without his experience under Nakothi's rule, he might have called this thing nightmarish. But compared to some of the servants the Dead Mother could create, it almost looked natural.

  It pulled closer to him, neither slowing nor speeding up when it spotted him. Its tongue whipped at the floor around his feet, and one of its arms quested up near his face, pincers snapping open and closed next to his ear.

  With a shout, he drove the dagger down.

  He hit nothing. The 'spider' scuttled to the side, shoving him aside with several of its limbs. He brushed against its body as it pushed him against the wall; its skin was cold and covered in bristles.

  This was it. All his thoughts of grand rebellion, and it ended halfway down the hallway. He couldn't say he was surprised.

  He tried to bring his weapon back around, but a bundle of sharp limbs pricked him in the back, pushing him forward. He landed hard on his elbows and chin, filling his vision with white pain. Everything from his teeth to his wrists shivered in agony, and it took him a long moment to gather himself.

  The human slid around, still lying on the floor, only to see the spider-thing headed away, back toward Nakothi’s territory. When it moved him, it hadn’t even slowed.

  After taking a few seconds to process that he was still breathing, the human moved up to a sitting position, the cool stone wall propping up his back.

  He breathed deeply, his hands shaking. The Elderspawn hadn't cared about him at all. It had seen him, he was sure, by the way the stalk-eyes swiveled to follow him. But he was beneath notice. Nakothi's Children would have attacked him out of pure malice, but this thing was on a mission.

  Which meant he was in the right place. A Great Elder that would spawn such a focused creature had to be better than the Dead Mother.

  He walked through the hallway with new purpose, shoving the bone into his waistband. Another hour passed before the hallway began to open up, the ceiling and walls sloping away.

  The passage led to another door, this one twice as tall as he was. It was carved with strange signs that could have been numbers, arranged in rows, columns, and occasionally loops. Was it a message? A warning? A puzzle? A map? No slave would know; this was meant for the eyes of their inhuman masters.

  But here, in the domain of a new Great Elder, he might have the chance to find out.

  He placed a hand on the door and closed his eyes.

  It was easier to get a feel for this door's memory, but less useful. Knowledge and memories passed over him like clouds caught in a hurricane, leaving only brief impressions. He got the sense that he was trying to understand a mountain by looking very closely at a pebble.

  Some sensations were more tangible than others. Curiosity was a recurring theme, as were alternating patterns of frustration and satisfaction. It was like the door remembered innumerable questions, a thousand times a thousand, and the ensuing search for answers.

  A sympathetic yearning for knowledge burned in the human's heart. If he could find answers to even one of his questions behind this door, he could die happy.

  It took him almost another hour to figure out how to open the door, which involved rotating the symbols in a particular pattern. He tried over a hundred combinations before growing frustrated and seeking the correct method in the door's past.

  He felt a sense of pride when the designs finally locked into place and the door swung open, but it was nothing compared to his awe when he saw what waited within.

  It was a library.

  He'd heard of the concept. Some of the humans had been commanded to construct a library, a project which took them almost ten years, though Nakothi used living brains or stretches of skin to contain her records as often as books. In fact, though the human had hauled crates full of books in the past, he had never actually seen one up close.

  And here was an ocean of books. More books than he had lived days in his life. The room soared to the sky, and it was filled with towers of shelves. Each shelf was packed with books of an infinite number of sizes and descriptions. High up, shadowed by distance, the human saw metal walkways crossing from one shelf to another.

  Elderspawn spiders, like the one that had crossed him in the tunnel earlier, scuttled over every surface. They ran over the floor, some carrying books or tools, and they moved up and down the towers of books, opening, removing, or reorganizing them according to some system he couldn't grasp.

  As a whole, the sight was beyond him. It was like this Great Elder, whoever he, she, or it was, had constructed a city just to house books. Why? The Elders had all the knowledge their slaves didn't. Was this where they kept it all?

  Finally, he noticed something indistinct about the scene that had bothered him since the door opened: there were no slaves. No servants carrying supplies or messages, no one chained together in labor lines, no body parts spread out for food. Nothing. No evidence humans were here, or ever had been.

  Perhaps that was why the spider had ignored him in the hallway—because it didn't know what he was.

  No, that doesn't fit. He had sensed nothing more strongly than curiosity since he'd come to this new Great Elder's tunnel. If it hadn't known what he was, it would have torn him apart to examine him.

  So the only explanation was that they knew all about humans, and they didn't care. To them, that was a question solved.

  He stepped up to a nearby spider Elderspawn. It didn't slow down, shuffling books on the bottom shelf, but it did spin one eye to look at him.

  The human waved a hand nearby. It didn't react. After a few seconds, it didn't even bother keeping the one eye on him. When it finished its task, it shuffled away.

  Here, he was the next best thing to invisible.

  After glancing around to make sure none of the spiders could see him, he pulled a book out of the shelf. He couldn't read it, of course, but eventually he'd be able to decode the symbols. He had the rest of his life. And maybe the memories of the book itself would help.

  The room around him went silent. He hadn't realized how persistent the scuttling of the spiders' legs was until they stopped completely.

  Moving slowly to avoid startling anything, the human turned his head around. Every spider was frozen in place, their eyes all swiveled to stare straight at him.

  Carefully, he slid the book back.

  The spiders kept staring at him.

  Not invisible, he thought. Now I know.

  Deep in the shadows, between the towers of books, something moved. Something mountainously broad that shook the floor as it shifted.

  A Great Elder.

  Bookshelves rose over the room, so high the top of each tower was hidden by distance. The human stood frozen, staring at the shadows between the shelves.

  The darkness shifted and reality itself shook as the Great Elder heaved itself closer.

  He could see the creature only in silhouette: a formless, shifting mass that was more of a distortion than anything he could wrap his mind around. It looked almost like one of the ten-legged spiders he'd seen before, only with far more legs. But as far as he could tell in th
e distance, none of those legs were the same shape. Some of them were tentacles, hundreds of paces long, that stuck onto the nearby book-towers and hauled the Elder's bulk forward. Other limbs had shapes that were harder to discern.

  As it lurched forward, its presence grew stronger. The human had felt Nakothi's presence on more than one occasion, and her proximity made his skin crawl with its twisted blend of vibrant life and rotting death. This sensation was utterly different.

  It was as though he understood everything in the world, but each fact only stayed for a fraction of a thought before it left him entirely. He saw himself as a piece in a greater plan, sitting on a throne, and with only a second more consideration he could understand the steps leading to that future. Then the vision vanished, and he realized each of the bookshelves was also a load-bearing pillar. He could see how the weight was distributed, like a latticework of glowing lines scattered in each shelf. From this perspective, the library was hypnotic in its perfection, but he lost that vision as quickly as he'd lost the other.

  He intuitively grasped the exact distance between him and each of the Elderspawn spiders, and from that instant calculation, he understood they were arrayed in a very specific pattern, according to a singular design. They were not individuals as he knew the concept, but expressions of a single mind.

  A breath later, that idea made no sense to him, leaving only a memory he couldn't understand.

  Bits of language drifted through his mind, his intentions translating themselves in words he'd never spoken. Time stretched, distorted, and spun by; time itself seemed a ridiculous concept, mortality a silly and unnecessary construction.

  His confusion would have become panic if not for the pieces of absolute information that kept striking, dispersing his fears before they had a chance to form. He'd reach for his bone dagger, only to realize how stupid he'd look by drawing a weapon. Upon being faced with ultimate knowledge, why would he first react with violence? That would be denying what he sought.

  Then he would shake it off and come back to himself again, moving for his weapon, and his thoughts would freeze in a splash of cold logic. An improvised weapon made of bone against a godlike Elder? He might as well not draw it. A display of hostility had a greater chance of getting him killed than actually protecting him.

  The fit passed, he finally got a grip on his dagger, and he realized the Great Elder had arrived while he was distracted by his own mind. He had been swallowed up.

  Or so it seemed. The Great Elder was nothing but limbs, ending at a single point he couldn't distinguish. An uncountable number of shifting digits and fleshy protrusions hung in the center of the library, hanging from tentacles and claws that grasped the nearby shelves. Stalks of flesh surrounded the human from all sides: stalk-eyes scanning his face, a sixteen-foot tongue flicking lightly over the skin of his arm, a flower-like trumpet pressing itself against his chest to hear his heartbeat.

  Some of them were sensory organs he could recognize, or else intuit from the aura of knowledge that seemed to hang around this Elder like a fog. Others were more obscure. One spidery arm ended in what looked like a metal prong that hummed and vibrated as though struck. Another tendril vented a cloud of coppery-smelling gas that flowed around him like a spirit, then returned. What were they sensing? The entity's entire body seemed designed to constantly reap a harvest of information.

  When the words came, they brought with them absolute comprehension of their intent, making all other speech seem slow and clunky by comparison.

  A DEVIANT. INTERESTING. BIOLOGICAL DEVIATION?

  Elder fingers prodded, pressed against his throat to check his pulse, stared him in the eye from an inch away. Before it occurred to the human to reply verbally, the voice continued.

  NO. BIOLOGICAL UNIQUENESS NEGLIGIBLE. PSYCHOLOGICAL?

  This time, the Elder waited for the human to respond.

  His first impulse was to kneel. All the humans knew Elders tended to spare slaves who followed orders, and who were more helpful than troublesome. He wanted to live so badly his knees trembled, seeking the floor.

  But he remained standing. He'd made a determination before leaving Nakothi's territory: he would find a way to work against the Elders, or he would die trying. This could be the beginning of either one of those fates.

  “Before we begin,” he said, “what should I call you?” His voice sounded woefully inadequate next to that of the Great Elder, but it didn't quake. For that, he was proud.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL ANOMALY CONFIRMED. MORE INTERESTING. One or more of its limbs let out a whistling sound, like a flute. I AM ACH'MAGUT.

  That last word came loaded with more meaning than the rest of the Elder's statements combined. It wasn't just a name, but a description.

  He was Ach'magut, the custodian of knowledge. The guardian of thought. He with an eternal appetite that can never be sated. He would know everything, and by knowing it, control it. By controlling it, know it. There was no such thing as destruction, only the conversion of existence from one form into another, and Ach'magut was one who craved to understand everything in all its forms.

  He watched all, guided all, supervised all, discovered all. As Nakothi was the Dead Mother, he was the Overseer.

  Its voice sounded masculine, so the human had started to think of it as a 'he,' but the name came with a forcible reminder that the Great Elder was neither male nor female. It reproduced in a manner the human could not even remotely comprehend. Still, the word “it” made him think of an object, and the Elder was certainly alive. In a way, it made ordinary men and women seem dull and lifeless by comparison.

  For the sake of his own sanity, the human decided to continue thinking of Ach'magut as a 'he.'

  “I am...” the human began to introduce himself, but he stopped when he realized he could never define himself as the Great Elder had. Other slaves had referred to him by name, of course. He'd come to realize that people could not interact with anything without naming it. Even Nakothi's Handmaidens had called him individually on a handful of occasions. But he had nothing like a standard name, because there had been no need for it.

  The other workers on his shift called him “Miner,” “Ditch-digger,” or “Rock-hauler,” because those were his usual duties. The woman who had kept him safe as a child called him “Clean,” because he was always cleaner than the other children. Every person in his life had a different name for him.

  But until this moment, he had never known that he had no name for himself.

  The buzzing metallic fork, the one that grew organically from one of Ach'magut's tentacles, hovered by his ear. It sounded like a nest of wasps.

  NAMELESS. ALONE. DEVIANT. INTERESTING.

  “...I am one who comes here looking for knowledge,” the human said.

  It was a gamble. The Great Elder could pity him as a fellow knowledge-seeker or punish him as a potential competitor. Judging by what he'd felt as the Elder approached, he suspected that it would consider all possible reactions and choose one based on some alien set of criteria.

  In this case, the limbs shivered like a tree in the wind. One bulb spat out a cloud of spores. Time itself stretched for a long instant, and the human could practically feel possibilities branching out from this moment as the Great Elder deliberated.

  Whether to break him down into his components, press him into service, or let him do as he wished in the library.

  Finally, the verdict came.

  CHANGE COMES FROM DEVIATION. UNDERSTANDING COMES FROM CHANGE. DEVIANCE CANNOT BE PREDICTED.

  Ach'magut delivered these lines not as an expression of his own thoughts, but almost like a riddle. He delivered them like a prophecy, as though he'd told the human everything.

  “Do you want something from me? Is this a deal?”

  A jet-black eye on a stalk swiveled around the human’s neck, studying him from multiple angles. I AM NOT THARLOS. WHAT I WANT IS NOT CHANGE FOR ITS OWN SAKE. I WANT THE FUTURE.

  And in those words, the human saw the future, or a
t least an Elder vision of it. All knowledge, all wisdom, unified into one organism. A single, perfect consciousness that could bend in on itself, searching its own infinite contours for further inspiration.

  The idea was so incomprehensible, so fundamentally impossible, that the human’s mind staggered back. Ach’magut believes that I am the path. Or one step in that direction.

  So be it. If he had to walk the same road as one Elder to uproot the others, he would do it with a smile on his face.

  The Elder limbs withdrew back to their origin, and Ach'magut began his strange, swinging crawl as he progressed back into the distance of his unimaginably vast library. Now that he was moving again, he once again threw off bits of information like sparks from a fire. The human knew the exact number of bookshelves in the entire building one instant, and the next, he understood the complex ecosystem of air, moisture, mold and insects among the books.

  SHOW ME THE FUTURE, FORMER SLAVE, Ach'magut said, leaving the room behind him.

  The Great Elder's definition shook the human from his bones outward, rocking his body and mind. He was a slave no longer. He had well and truly left servitude behind.

  From here, he could learn.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Shera's breath steamed in the darkness. Early autumn, and the nights were starting to take on a chill. Fortunately the Gardener blacks were well-crafted, or possibly well-invested. They were cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and bloodstains washed right out.

  She and Ayana lay side-by-side on the edge of a roof, looking out over their target: a Capital mansion. It looked more like a number of townhouses stacked on top of and next to one another, until it resembled nothing so much as a small town all bunched together. But it was certainly a mansion: a pair of tiger statues waited by the entrance, amidst carefully pruned and tended shrubbery on either side. Gargoyles waited on the highest eaves, and guards patrolled the grounds every half hour.