The Cry of the Night
Hound
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By John C
Wright
1.
The monsters still howl for him, months after he fell.
In the gloom, I
can sometimes see one or the other, sometimes both together, wolfish
beasts with leathery hides and dark bristles, and they raise their
grinning, shark-like mouths to the black clouds above and utter their
cries.
Impossible that such horrors could love a child of man,
and be
faithful; impossible. Yet they do not molest the body, nor even
approach it.
My brother Polynices lies in plain view on the baked
black salt of the
Night Land. The hollow where he fell has a smoke-hole in it center,
some five yards beyond his motionless, outflung hand, and the smolder
from the hole casts a light across his form.
He lies many miles below the armored windows of our
redoubt, but even
so, the spy-glasses and instruments of the Monstruwacans (those
scholars whose business it is to watch the horrors of the Night)
leaning from the balconies, can pick out minute details.
The fingers of his gauntlet are stretched out, as if he
were reaching
for the little warmth of the smoke hole as he perished. He lays on a
slight incline, for a circle of salty mineral surrounds the smoke hole
and slopes toward it. His boots are toward us. The smoke hole is to his
left. His helmet fell from his head, and rolled a yard down the salty
slope. The little trail the helmet made as it fell is still visible.
There has been no wind, no earth tremors, to disturb the salt crystals
and erode the trail. The haft and great wheel of his disk-ax weapon lay
to his right, and the shadow of his body falls across it, making
details difficult to make out, even under the immense magnifications of
the Great Spy Glass. The hair I used to tousle has continued to grow as
the months have passed, and now falls across the shoulder-plates of his
armor and spills onto the salt. I cannot see those wild locks without
wishing for my comb of nacre to put the tangles right. He was always
careless of his appearance.
Because of the angle of his fall, I cannot make
out his face. Did
he die calmly? Or is a rictus of hollow terror and despair frozen
forever on his features?
His right forearm is hidden under his body, as if his
teeth were
seeking the lethal capsule buried under the flesh of his forearm when
he fell. Did he fall too swiftly to bite the capsule, and slay himself
wholesomely, before his soul and spirit were Destroyed?
There is no blood visible. There is no sign of wounds.
2.
When we were young, my brother and I found a
long-deserted balcony
lock, and from a previous life he remembered the word to open it.
He and I would climb through the broken armor of the
window in one of
the abandoned cities in the base level of the Pyramid. With fearless
hearts and unsteady feet we would pick among the tilted slabs of
imperishable metal, and find a little niche, about five hundred yards
above the Night Land, open to the thin air and stinking fumes. We would
sit with our lunch basket and spyglass on the corroded lip of some
ancient corbel, our legs dangling and kicking above the smoke and
darkness of the Land, and we would hear the voices of monsters
muttering and hissing underfoot, see the glinting eyes of remote and
cyclopean faces, or feel the dull throb of their malice beating against
the sheath of energized air surrounding the Pyramid.
There was a series of irregular stairs leading down and
down from a
little ways below that spot, but we never dared to venture down.
I remember I wore short-pants then, like a boy’s. During
my childhood,
before I had a name, I was called Païs or Meirax, or something of
the sort; the servants called me Annasa, of course.
Because my father was the Castellan, the nurses and
tutors had no
credible threat to make when I defied them, or tore my girlish pink
bloomers to shreds. Later, when I was old enough to know what grief my
antics caused my father, or what pleasure my father’s critics in the
Opposition Seats, I dressed more demurely outwardly, though inwardly, I
suppose, I was much the same.
3.
From the steles we found on that hidden cleft, at the
top of those
forbidden stairs, we knew this place had been made by the Labdaciteans,
great-grandfather’s people. The locks recognized our life-patterns, and
called us by his name.
We knew the tale. Before even grandfather was born,
Labdacus eroded the
power of the Architects, by making climbing-paths not shown on their
charts, to run from window to window between the levels, that his loyal
retainers might circumvent the blockades, when Architects cut power to
the inter-municipal Doors, or grounded the great Lifts. Grandfather
Laius, when he came of age, rose to preeminence on the promise that all
such unlawful paths and places would be destroyed, and the Last Redoubt
brought once more into honest conformity with the Great Central Survey
of the Architectural Order.
As an adult, I know the horror of wondering if there is
some gallery,
portal, or open window, unwatched and unlocked against the subtle
malice of the enemy, a hole a spider could wriggle through, or a crack
to admit a weft. Even we, young as we were, were scandalized to see the
breach of Labdacus. His crime was solid before our eyes, as plain to
touch as the smooth hole cut in the armor. The massive, ill-made blocks
of crooked stair lead down from it as a blood trail leads down from a
wound. But it was a pleasing scandal, and our fear made us grin sickly
grins, for it was our great-grandfather who had committed, not a petty
crime, but a great one.
We promised each other we would never do anything so
wicked as meddle
with the walls and wards by which Man lives.
But we were also pleased to have a secret known to none,
a place only
those of the blood of Labdacus could pass. We considered our promise
fulfilled by vowing to tell no one of our find. The idea that we should
have immediately sent for the Architects, or the local Officer of the
Watch, never crossed our young minds.
We were the children of the Castellan, after all.
4.
Not long after my age of majority, not long after my
father’s death and
the ascension of Creon to power, I came to tread these same broken
slabs of ancient metal again.
This time, my footsteps were not as sure as a
thoughtless child’s would
have been, nor was my costume as suited for the adventure. I wore
a skirt to my ankles and a blouse buttoned to my throat, and my hair
was pinned up and coiffed in a fashion I envied when it was forbidden
to me, but which was now a bother to dress and maintain. My gloves
clutched the corroded wall as I inched in my foolishly heeled shoes
across the sloping face of the armor, a dizzying drop to the lands of
darkness opening up behind and below my bustle.
The child I had been would not have known me. Païs
had been so
unafraid, and I was so fearful now.
Once only I looked over my shoulder. In the light of a
recent volcano,
I could glimpse the tall shadows of two kiln-giants, their heads
together as if in consultation. One of them raised a heavy hand and
pointed at me, while its lamp-eyed companion nodded. This
unnerved me, so I clutched the metal beneath my gloves more firmly, and
returned my eyes to the task.
I made it around the last turn and came with relief to
the sturdier
footing and broader step of the ancient and unused corbel.
Polynices was in his armor, standing where once he’d
lunched as a
child. The long handle of his disk-ax weapon was in his hand, and he
leaned upon it in an attitude of alertness, his head staring down at
the darkened Land.
He was listening.
Up from the gloom underfoot came the mournful, haunting
sound of a
Night-Hound, baying.
Having found his hiding place, I did not wish to speak,
lest I startle
him. I had the mental image of him dropping his Diskos over the side,
or, worse, himself.
He said, “Rightly or wrongly, the dogs are mine, and I
must feed them.”
I said quietly, “They are monsters. They are howling
because they
thirst for your blood, not because they love you.”
Polynices shook his head grimly, not bothering to look
back at me.
“Draego saved my life from the Abhumans. I fed him from my hand, and he
knows not how to eat from any other. See! Even now he will not hunt
among the crags and chasms of the Night Land, or worry pale flesh of
slug-things from their lightless holes or blind fish from poisoned
lakes. He starves, and stands before the gates of the Last Redoubt, and
howls his love and sorrow for me. Dracaina is often with him, and joins
her weeping voice to his.”
“Monsters. Do you not understand the word? Enemies of
man.”
“Not these. Love can break even the power of the Night.
My dogs are my
friends.”
“They are not dogs! They are Night-Hounds!”
He said nothing, but listened to the mournful howling of
the monsters
far below.
On and on they wailed. Once, both Night-Hounds fell
silent, when the
Great Laughter began to issue from a buried country to the east, a deep
trench whose upper crumbling banks are visible from the Last Redoubt.
Another time, the Hounds were silenced again when a deep and monstrous
Voice from a cold volcano cone called out in a long-forgotten language,
uttering a rough shout that traveled and echoed across the Night Land
like a clap of thunder, traveling away to the North. The Night-Hounds
were hushed for a while, perhaps cowering in terror, but then their
howling and lamenting began again.
“I had a dream that you would die.” I told him.
He said, “I will find a way to smuggle food out to them.
I do not fear
the law.”
The Great Laughter issued from the eastern hills and
canyons at that
moment, trembling across the strange and barren landscapes of the
Night, and this seemed a fitter answer than anything I could devise.
5.
The chief tale of the House of Andros tells how a woman
who perished
like Polynices, without a mark, without a sound, in the Night Lands, by
a singular and peculiar miracle, was revived, and lived and bore fifty
sons and daughters who became the ancestors of my house and phylum.
I should think the implications of this are obvious.
6.
To watch over the body of my brother, I stand on a high
balcony, some
five miles above the hills and plains, glaciers and craters, volcanoes
and venom-lakes of the Night Land, and I look through over my brother
through one of the spy-glasses of the Monstruwacan, the
monster-watcher, of this tier.
The Great Redoubt rises seven miles above the cratered
landscape,
motionless waters, smoking pits and dull fumes of the Night Land, and
the Tower of Observation a full mile beyond that. The Night Land is not
utterly dark, for strange flares of light, burning torches hanging in
the gloom, or foetid burnings from smoke-holes will illume one thing or
another, and there are candles in the windows of an Empty City to the
Northeast. From the embrasures of the Great Redoubt, as from a
mountainside, what little there is to be seen, can be seen.
Haemon, my betrothed, stands near to me. He is
beautiful, with great
dark eyes and long lashes, but broad of shoulder and narrow of waist,
with strong hands and a ready smile. I wish he were not so young. I
wish I could love him as I ought, enough to blot out other loves from
my heart.
7.
The embrasure is open to the night air, and I can smell
the sulfur fume
from some lingering volcano miles away to the east, and can hear the
soft calls of voices from beneath the Deadly Lake, or the scrapes and
grunts of behemoths digging at the foundations of the Pyramid. In the
middle distance, between my view and the Pit of the Red Glow, a tall
shadow passes. At that distance, the being would need to be a third of
a mile high to be visible, and it was probably a Manifestation, rather
than something made of matter as we understand it.
At first I turn the spy glass down. Below and to the
east is a line of
low hills, which geologist say to be the slag and tailings of the
Diggings of the Giants beyond, although the hills block my view of the
digs. Nonetheless, I can hear the noise of their labor, the thudding of
machines, and see the vapor rising from the warm caverns they excavate.
Mathematicians argue about the volume of the hills, or how large is the
tunnel they are mining. The work has been going on for perhaps two
thousand years, and the estimate is that in another four thousand, they
will have opened a vent far enough down the buried sides of the pyramid
that the influence of the Electric Circle will not dismay them. If they
reach deep enough, they will contact the armored surface sheathing our
buried country of farms. Some savants aver the Giants have no art nor
tool that can scratch or scar our armored walls; others are doubtful.
The less doubtful place faith in those prophecies or reports dreamers
of future times confirm, that it will be four million years, not a mere
four thousand, before the Outer Beings break in to our mighty home and
slay us all.
A squadron of Dun Giants, the same race as those who
dig, are encamped
before our gates. They squat in low, round, windowless huts made of
broken slabs, which, in previous ages, fell from upper balconies, or
were thrown down to repel assault. Our instruments from time to time
detect the mutter of machines beneath, which perhaps supply the crude
huts with heat or wholesome air. When some noise from our windows
attracts them, the Dun Giants take up their mattocks and truncheons,
and come stand as nigh the Electric Circle as they dare, hooting and
bellowing, and making massive gestures with their arms.
Three of the Dun Giants, seventy-one years ago, fell
motionless, and
stand upright, neither alive nor dead, very near the lower gate.
Measurements taken over the last forty years show they are growing
about half an inch every ten years. In four hundred thousand years they
will be the size of the Fixed Giants old records say were once grouped
around the Lesser Redoubt before its Fall. Their eyes glitter as they
watch us, and no other part of them can move. Already their lower
trunks and legs are swollen and coated with a dark crust.
The sensitive instruments of the Monstruwacans report
that there are
strange energies building up in them, as the years pass, and their
psychometric range passes farther and ever farther from the norm of
biological life. About once a decade, the one on the left utters a
great, slow roar of terror and woe, as if the monster regrets what
departs from it.
I pause to check the fit of the skull-cusps. A dial
shows the
protective flow of Earth-Current is steady. Then I bring the glass up
to the middle focus, and look left and right at sights more dangerous
to view.
Here is the Northwest Watching Thing, a motionless
mountain of
something that lives, though it is not flesh and blood, nor anything we
understand. It is the darkest and most mysterious of the Watching
Things, for there is no light nearby to it, and it is also said to be
the most deadly, for the land before it is flat and clear for many
miles, with few places to hide. Once, a million years ago, it loomed in
the light from the Red Pit, and the Monstruwacans of those ages could
gaze upon its great, grim face hanging outside our windows like the
legendary moon of elder times. An inch per century, glacier-like, it
circumnavigated the Pit, and now is in the shadows to one side of the
Pit, and so will be for another half million years. Mathematicians
predict that in five hundred thousand years, it will move forward so
that the light from the Pit will be behind it, and our remote
descendents will be able to examine its silhouette clearly.
From time to time, if ground-lightning discharges near
the
mountain-slopes that form its legs and paws, the reflection will show
the great monstrous head tilted forward at an angle, a terrible great
nod, and our stories say that it moved its head to this position when
two brave fools from an earlier time ventured forth and came too near
to it.
If the men of the eldest days of the world had seen the
moon turn its
huge, gray, sterile globe when ancient astronauts drew nigh, so that
mountains and seas never before seen, drawn into view from the hidden,
farther side of the moon, would now be visible rising and setting over
all the lands of men, their astonishment could not have been more than
ours, to know the Watching Thing inclined its head at an angle
different from what uncounted hundreds of thousand of years had known.
Many miles from it, looms its brother, the Watching
Thing of the
Northeast. It is also called The Crowned Watcher, for a dull halo of
blue light hangs ever above it, and throws its face and hunched
shoulders into shadow. No features can be seen in that shadow, and it
is not even certain whether the being has eyes. But one enormous
bell-like ear is spread out from the side of a skull larger than a
hillside, and very ancient reports hint that the ear sometimes can be
seen to quiver, when the noise of voice and music from the Last
Redoubt, or human laughter, or the rush of wind from our great
air-cycling machines, or the lap of water from our indoor fountains and
lakes, steals across the icy air. Whether it can pick out individual
voices from the pyramid, or hears our individual footsteps and
heartbeats, is a matter of speculation and debate.
The long furrows or discolorations that streak its elbow
and arm, some
say are evidence that a race of servile beings once raised towers and
aqueducts along the creature’s lower slopes, perhaps to render it
medical aid. Others say the discolorations are a sign of a rotting skin
disease, and what look like the foundations of ruined towers are merely
pock-marks. Since there is no light on its mask or chest, it cannot be
said whether the discoloration continues to other parts of its skin or
not. No person has ever ventured near enough the Watching Thing of the
Northeast to settle the dispute.
I can center the view along the imaginary line joining
the crowns of
the two monsters, and track left to pan across the dark gloom between
the two Watching Things. Here, on a low hill a few miles north, shine
the unwinking lights of the House of Silence, and I see the outline of
its roof and eaves. In all the millions of years our histories record,
those lights have never wavered, never blinked, nor has any one of them
gone out, nor any new one joined their number. The great main doors of
the House of Silence stand wide open, and our long-range telescopes can
glimpse the passageway beyond, sloping downward. Since eternity, those
doors have never been shut.
A hooded figure stands half-hidden at the doorpost of
the entrance,
facing inward. Philosophers who study such things opine that there
might be a second hooded shape, standing at the opposite doorpost,
facing the first; but the open leaf of the Silent Door blocks any view
from the Last Redoubt.
Once, three hundred thousand years ago, Aetius the
Unwise, viewing from
the Tower of Observation through the Great Spy Glass, claimed to have
seen the hooded figure nod, as a man might nod to another in a
conversation; and he entered this in the Great Log of the
Monstruwacans. From this basis, Aetius wrote a monograph claiming that
there must be a second hooded one, positioned opposite in the shadow of
the never-closed great doors, and facing the first. However, the entry
in the log is surrounded with doubt and controversy, for Aetius’ watch
officer, the man on duty to record and confirm the sighting, had also
been staring for too long at the lights of the House of Silence, and
went mad, and slew himself by putting his head beneath the geared
wheels of the Great Spy Glass as the engines were turning it. The name
of the watch officer is not recorded in our archives. Since the
testimony of Aetius is unsupported, the Monstruwacans note his sighting
as “unendorsed” and leave the topic of the Second Hooded figure as an
open question.
The name of the particular branch of science devoted to
speculations
about the doors of the House of Silence is called Ostiumology: the two
competing theories, whether there is one figure or two, are called
Monoianitorianism and Bianitorianism.
I know this because the sad, wild thought ever occurs to
me that
Polynices, from his position, as he died, saw what is hidden behind the
second valve of the doors to the House of Silence, the doors that never
in eternity have closed, and he could have settled the disputes of the
academics for once and all.
One more adjustment of the dial, and I can drop my view
in a straight
line. Less than eight miles from the House of Silence, in the middle of
an otherwise unnamed and unremarkable landscape of scattered fire-pits
and sickly moss-bushes, I can find the smoke-hole where my brother
fell.
Sometimes the smoke is thick, blocking all view.
Sometimes the smoke is
agitated, flying in a quick stream straight upward, and the fire below
is active, so that enough light spills from it that I can glimpse his
form.
I have watched every waking-period for the last nine
months, waiting.
Perhaps I was waiting for the return of the mist-man, whose
insubstantial body shined with light, or perhaps an eruption of volcano
or ground-lighting, to cast a glare across the body that would be
cleaner and clearer to my sight than the fitful flickers of the
smoke-hole.
I can adjust the dials of the spy-glass so that
Polynices seems to be
almost in my arms. He seems a short way off, and could I but reach out
my hand, I should touch him.
He is not a short way off. And whenever the image in the
spy-glass
grows misty with tears, and whenever I forget myself, I do reach out my
hand, and my hand is too short to reach him, my brother who lies
unburied and unmourned so many miles away.
8.
“You have watched your brother’s corpse for nine
months.” Haemon spoke
with cautious delicacy, as one who is unwilling to argue, but unwilling
not to argue.
I said, “There is still no sign of deterioration.”
He sighed. “For seven months you have sent out
hour-slips, asking if
any man among the millions is bold enough to venture forth, and recover
your brother’s body. My father the Castellan will forbid you to ask
again: later this watch he will make the announcement.”
I looked at him sidelong. “How do you know?”
He smiled his easy smile, but did not answer. Handsome
as he is, there
are many among the High Court who would have welcomed his friendship,
even were he not of penultimate rank, the most elite of the most elite
phylum. He had no need to seek out courtiers to spy for him.
“Hear this, “ I said, “The Castellan may rule the civic
business of the
Great Redoubt, but he does not rule me.”
His charming smile vanished. “But, darling, my father
rules the comings
and goings from the Great Lower Gate, which have not been opened in one
hundred years, except for your brother’s expedition. The time when men
venture forth from the pyramid and walk the lands of night and death
are passed.”
“There are lesser gates no records betray. My brother
used one to go
Out and feed his monsters. I know the word to open it.”
“You contemplate mere madness, my beloved. The Castellan
has placed
your brother’s name on the interdicted list, and decreed that no songs
should be sung of him, and no eulogy pronounced. Published obituaries
are ordered to consist of his birth-hour, his father’s name, his hour
of elevation, matriculation, and communion, and a list of his criminal
charges, and no more.”
I said nothing, but my knuckles were white on the dials
of the spy
glass.
Haemon continued speaking, his voice was soft, tactful,
the very soul
of reason: “The escutcheon of your father’s branch of the family will
be blotted with an image of a mutilated crone; your house paean will be
replaced with the cry of the Night-Hound, and these humiliations are to
linger until such time as monsters rend and despoil that man’s body,
nameless hereafter, who lays face-down in the crater of black salt,
near the fume of the smoke-pit.”
I speak without taking my eye from the eyepiece of the
glass: “Then the
blot will never be removed, for my brother’s body will be recovered.
His name is Polynices.”
“No man will venture forth for you.”
“Will you go?”
The lovely smile returned. “Gladly will I die for you,
beloved, but
should I, even for you, allow my soul to be Destroyed by the Slowly
Turning Wheel which still haunts the area where your brother fell?”
“Then I will go.”
“Madness! Ancient laws forbid that women venture forth.”
“My brother shall live again. He is not dead.”
9.
There are one thousand cities, some empty of life and
light, others
green with wintergardens and gold with incandescent lamps, each
metropolis smaller and higher than the one beneath, all protected under
the sloping walls of our seven-mile-high pyramid where the last of the
human race are besieged. Polynices, once the dreams started to afflict
him, told me there was a time before our records reach, when men walked
and built upon the surface beyond these mighty walls.
I remember it was a twelvemonth before my Naming Day,
when he first
spoke of this to me; for I was in my older sister’s room, seated before
her looking glass, wearing her dancing-uniform and pinning up my hair.
The uniform was a white tunic and bright red pantaloons whose leggings
were wider than a skirt. I was curious to see what I might look like
this time next year, once I could wear my hair up, as a grown woman
can, to show the line of my neck. I had the glass viewpoint adjusted to
show me from behind, so I could only see Polynices from the back, and I
was looking over his shoulder at first one coiffeur of mine, then the
next.
I said to him lightly: “Impossible that men once walked
abroad! The
Night Hounds would have eaten them. And can men live in eternal gloom,
with only scattered fire-pits for light, and only moss-bush and sand to
eat? You cannot tell me they drank from the waters of the Cold Venom
Sea.”
“I mean,” he said patiently, “Our ancestors once walked
abroad, in a
time when things were not as now.”
“Your ancestors and mine? Of course! We know there was a
second race of
humanity living elsewhere. In the Lesser Redoubt. Nine hundred thousand
years ago it fell, but here is the proof that it once reared a tower
above a land of endless darkness.” I plucked a hair from my head and
waved it, giggling.
“Beautiful hair, mistress,” murmured the indentured girl
helping me
brush and comb. She was older than I was, but I don’t recall her name.
I think she was from a city somewhere in the four hundreds. There air
pressure there is different, because of a failure of the machines in
ages past, and her folk are said to have acuter hearing than those of
us who live on highest decks.
Polynices was not impressed. His hair was as dark as
mine, his cheek as
high, his eyes as slanted. “No,” said he, “I mean the ancestors of all
the men of all the cities of the Great Redoubt. We walked abroad, and
farmed, and rode. All men. I saw it.”
I said, “You no doubt recovered a dream from a braver
day than this, if
all the men tested their boldness by venturing into the Dark! Perhaps
the numbers of mankind were fewer, or the sources of metal more, to
equip every jack and squire with arms and armor, and Earth-Current
flowing without meter or without rationing, to charge the weapons and
weave the broad gray cloaks that keep the deadly chill of Everlasting
Night away. Ah! You must have seen a wondrous time indeed!”
I remembered being delighted with the fancy, speculating
what men must
have been like, in that long-lost era, when folk still ventured from
the Pyramid; men like Andros.
I said sadly: “Weren’t the gates sealed and fused shut
years ago?”
10.
Now I stand on the balcony and study the creatures
guarding my
brother’s body. When atmospheric conditions are right, long range
microphones can pick out the noise of their cries. Usually it is but
one, rather than both; and they go away for weeks at a time. But always
they come back, barking and wagging their poisonous tails, as if
expecting him to rise again, and feed them from his hand. When he does
not rise, they throw back their heads and utter their mournful cry.
There is a noise like that in my heart, a whining howl
that goes on and
on.
I should not envy them. And yet they stand within a few
yards of him.
They can see his features, his brave face, which the angle of his fall
hides from me.
How foolish the brutes are. He will never rise again.
Not for them.
If only I could stand where they stand.
11.
The men of my father’s generation were too timid to
venture Out.
The encampment of Dun Giants did not exist in ages past.
Some power
feeds and unnatural life in them, so that they need not scatter in
search of the unwholesome moss or fungi and deadly meats that sustain
them in the dark. Well fed, they are able to maintain an unceasing
watch against our doors, and rise up in many numbers should any of us
emerge from our armored fastness.
My grandfather Laius once told me the tale of Cyrus and
Darius
venturing forth. He said it happened in his youth that the pair went
forth together. One year when subterranean vapors sent the Dun Giants
into a stupor, they found an opportunity to slip the leaguer. They
meant to gather aetheric-photographs of the black aura surrounding the
Great Northwest Watching Thing, and perhaps creep close enough to the
Blue Shining Plain to measure what the shining substance was, or
discover why it was so deadly.
The two adventurers entered the Blue Plain, and were
lost from sight
for many weeks, and thought dead, for no person had ever entered that
place and lived. But then, beyond all hope, long-range spy glasses
detected two figures emerging from the silent blue fires on the far
side of the plain. They were spotted one and twice again, dark
silhouettes crossing patches of white ice, heading north and west.
Then, in the fiftieth hour after they had been seen to
emerge, an
unexpected eruption of a volcano spread a red and beating light, and
revealed their position. The Great Northwest Watching Thing had
not moved in perhaps a million years, but it tilted its head toward the
two adventurers, who stood, still as posts in the sudden glare, in the
midst of a flat and open place.
At once all the Night Land was filled with voices, and
the Land Whence
Comes Great Laughter began to yammer and shout. Beasts climbed from
their pits and holes that dot the dark plain between the Place Where
the Silent Ones Are Not and the diseased plateau above which burn the
Seven Unwinking Torches.
The two men dashed away from the volcano-firelight and
entered the
Broken Land, a place of pits and escarpments. Hours turned into weeks
as the monsters prowled and hunted the two adventurers, and millions
watched from the balconies of the Great Redoubt for some sign of them.
One was eaten by a Night-Hound. Grandfather said the
Night Hound
dragged the body very near to our gates, and sat on its haunches and
playing with the corpse, dandling the body from its paws and ripping
it, while harquebusiers shot ineffective lances of fire at the monster
from lower windows.
The other adventurer was making his cautious way black
toward the
pyramid. Grandfather told me that schoolboys and matrons returned every
waking-period to the Viewing Table chambers for their cities, to see if
the Great Spy Glass or any lesser glasses had caught a glimpse of the
surviving adventurer in his gray armor sneaking from moss-bush to
moss-bush, or darting across the baked mud of exposed ground.
Eventually the report came that he was seen, pale in the
gloom, running
naked toward the House of Silence, his head hanging oddly as he ran,
his armor and weapons gone. He entered the Doors that have never closed
since the beginning of Eternity.
Some observers stared at the House for many hours and
days afterwards,
hoping to catch perhaps a glimpse of the lost man through the uncased
windows of that place, and these observers had to be sedated later, for
they saw the beckoning dreams and heard the soft voices that those who
stare for too long at the House sometimes see and hear, and it was
clear their mind-training had not been sufficient to defend them.
I don’t remember which one, Darius or Cyrus, was slain
by the Night
Hound and which one was called into the House of Silence and Destroyed.
12.
I remember Polynices’ answer, that time when we spoke in
my sister’s
chambers. He said, “The gates are not fast shut. A man could walk out
into the Land our ancestors walked freely, every one of them.”
My brother’s words inspired me. I tried to imagine a
time when every
man was a brave as Andros. Surely in such an age, every woman would
have been as fair as Mirdath, or so I concluded in my girlish
certainty.
“Such bold men!” I said again, “To tempt death so
gallantly.”
“All men and woman too. I do not mean each man ventured
forth on one
brief mission as a test of strength. I mean we walked the Land and it
was our own. Many folk lived in houses and cities not far from
the Great Pyramid, each one surrounded by its own Electric Circle of
protective energy, its own sheath of Air-Clog to dispel the voices and
beguilements and stench. So much light was shed by the lower balconies
in those days, that green gardens grew in the open air, along the long
angles of light from the lower windows.”
“Foolish! No woman has ever trod the poisoned black grit
of the Night
Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful. Our laws forbid it.”
“This is a time before that law, before the Siege of
Man.”
“Some dreams are merely figments: impressions from our
daily toil and
pleasure, combined and recombined in our fancy when our waking nature
retires.” Since my brother was older than me, I enjoyed correcting him.
He shook his head slowly. “I sleep beneath a dreaming
glass. The glass
showed the images had a time-depth of over five million years. I saw a
flock of pigeons fly out from the windows of one great balcony, their
wings supported by the thick, warm air of those lost ages, and fly back
into others. The birds carried trinkets and letters or stamps of
perfume from lover to beloved, loves forbidden by the eugeneticists or
stricter parents of those aeons. That image was from a previous life,
long before the Seven Hundred Year famine, when all megafauna of our
underground parks were hunted to extinction, long before the Time of
the Weakening, before when any pets or livestock above the insect level
of organization began to be sensitive to influences from the Nine Iron
Towers, and had to be slain.”
I said, “Then your glass was untuned! The winged shape
we see in
decorations was never based on a real creature: birds are as mythical
as stars. The atmosphere beyond the Air-Clog is too weak to support a
kite, or a living-kite creature. And beside, you said you saw humans
riding! If we rode between these scattered houses gathered around the
skirts of the great Redoubt, where are the remains? We should see
rolling glide-ways here and there between points where human ruins once
had been.”
“I do not me we rode moving carpets like those that link
our cities. I
mean we road on the backs of monsters. A creature called a hippos. It
had the body of a Centaur and the head of a Gandharva. Other monsters
ran along the ground before us and behind, in a pack. They would bay
and give tongue when a monster who was a foe of man appeared, and the
young men would direct his pack against such foes, or slay them with a
spear charged with the Earth-Current.”
“Fantasy! Monsters kill us. We cannot ride their backs.”
“These creatures loved us.”
I noticed then that my lady’s maid was regarding
Polynices with a wary
look half-hidden in her eye, and so I excused her.
After she had gone, I hissed at him: “She is going to
report you to the
Remonstrators! Do you want the Masters of the Pale White Chamber to
come examine you? Honest folk have been put under the Mind Glass for
less than that! Do you care to draw the attentions of the Crowned
Watcher to your words? The mental-influence insulation of the Great
Redoubt cannot be made more perfect than the virtue of those within it
will support.”
He was staring thoughtfully at the hatch where the maid
had excused
herself. He said slowly: “I fear no summons to the Pale White Chamber.”
“Why? Are your thoughts so pure? Our father’s rank will
not protect us.”
He shook his head slowly. “Those who are undergoing the
Preparation are
immune from summons. So says the antique law.”
I pouted at him. “Did you find that in some old book?
Surely the Watch
was disbanded generations ago.”
“It still exists. Cadets in Preparation are considered
members, and are
hence immune from legal process, except by Writ from the Lord High
Officer of the Watch.”
“Silly! Your cannot hide in the Preparation
Chambers for more
than sixteen sleeping-periods. After that, the Proctor will see you do
not mean to go Out, and will thrust you from their preparation school,
send you back to your home city and level, and place you back under the
authority of the local Deacon. Then it is the Pale White Chamber for
you. You will be cleansed there of this thought that the Devourers once
were our friends: the thought is treason, blasphemy and suicide all at
once!”
“I mean to go Out.”
The blood of Mirdath is in me. I am no Dreamer, like my
brother, but I
had a visualization then. At that moment, staring at my brother’s
reflection in the glass, I also saw him, in my mind, as he would soon
be: laying on black salt, his weapon to one side, his hand outflung to
the other, his tangled hair spilled from his helmetless head: prone,
motionless, dead.
I rose from my chair, dropping the combs and pins I
played with, and
reached up to grasp his broad shoulders. I do not recall what I said,
or screamed, or wept, or even if I made a human noise at all. Perhaps I
spoke in calm and measured tones of reason; perhaps I begged and vowed.
I don’t recall. Eventually, he took my wrists lightly in his grip and
shrugged me away. I swooned. My hands were too weak to keep by brother
with me.
13.
The long straight hair I had plucked from my head, proof
that in elder
times men walked abroad from the Pyramid, lay visible against the
bright metal fabric of my sister’s carpet.
The hair of my cousins is dark as the sky, as are many
in my phylum. We
are descended from the Last Daughter, whom the histories call
Naäni, but we who are of her blood call her by the name she bore
in her former life in the Days of Light: Mirdath the Beautiful. The
first ancestor of the Andrides recovered her from the wreckage of her
people’s shattered fortress, which was called the Lesser Redoubt; so
called, for it rose no more than a mile in height, a pyramid of three
sides, each side three quarters of a mile along its base. The main race
of humanity were fairer of hue and hair than Mirdath had been, perhaps
because the Earth-Current surged more strongly through her conduits and
wall-segments, perhaps due to genetic meddling in the Lesser Pyramid of
a type which the Masters of Life-Knowledge in the Great Pyramid have
always forbidden.
I remember a tutor once telling me how history showed,
during the days
when men still dared the Outside, that the Sons of Andros were hardier
to endure the cold, and stubborner to rebuke the Mind-Whispers than
others who ventured in the Night Lands.
“The Lesser Redoubt, if ancient records are true, was
settled by many
who were restless of spirit, and went forth from the Great Redoubt, in
a time before the Watching Things came from the Outer Darkness to
beleaguer us. Eschatologists, who study the extinctions of those
creatures, the insects, pets or livestock which once dwelt here in the
Pyramid with us, call this pattern ‘self-selection.’ The stock of those
who were restless to depart Our Mighty Home, and hardy enough to cross
the Cold Waste and found another house, would preserve by that
Diaspora, that very characteristic removed from the common stock by
their departure.”
And, of course, Mirdath was revived when her body was
lowered in its
crystal coffin into the Crack beneath the foundations of our Pyramid,
that Crack from whence the Earth-Current pours forth. Her exposure to
those salubrious rays broke the trance, or coma, or little death
encompassing her, and her lover, astonished to tears by the miracle,
clasped her in his arms.
It may have been some strange quirk of her genetic code
that enabled
her to resist the deadly Powers and the thought-pressures of the
Uncouth Things in the darkness of the Land. It may have been the love,
eternal and potent, of Andros.
In my blood, the capacity for love such as his must yet
dwell, since I
am of lineage of Andros. A sister’s love for her brother burns with a
fire as divine as any man’s for his bride. In my brother’s blood, the
fortitude to resist the Powers surely cannot be less than that of our
great ancestress, and the capacity for resurrection must exist, for he
is of the lineage of Mirdath.
My heart tells me this is so. I have no other evidences;
but then, no
other evidences are at hand.
14.
I remember how solemn, how quiet, was the ceremony
before the
Seventy-Seven ventured to the Lower Gate, and Out into the Night Land.
The men wore the stern gray armor and unadorned helmets,
wore the
living cloaks and carried the heavy weapons of our ancestors. For close
foes, each man wore at his belt a fully-charged Dirk; for close
friends, an uncharged Misericord, which poets call the mercy-knife.
Each man carried a scrip with tablets, a horn of water-powder, a
purification bowl, a home-pointing needle, a heat-stone and a
basilisk-glass, just the same as any man of our race would have carried
from any period in the last six millions of years. They carried no
lanterns, no thinking-disks, no voice-instruments that disturb the
aether.
Down the great stairs they trod. The lower landings were
snuffed of all
light, and only the Masters of the Watch lined the stairs below that
last landing, standing silently in their dun armor, their weapons held
in salute. The other high-born stood with me above the lower landing,
for even we were not permitted so close to the lower gate. All the
stairs above were lined with crowds, multitudes without number.
How quiet we all were. The only noise I heard was
Father’s serving
woman, Optimina, who was quietly telling him what sights she saw as the
men filed past, quiet as ghosts.
How handsome my brother looked in his armor, and how
serene. All the
brave young men following him had looks as brave and steady, and their
eyes shined with pride.
A year later he returned alone.
15.
So strange to think back on that interval of time; to
realize how much
of my life I lived without him. I ended my novitiate with the
spiritualists, and was proved both for invasions of the memory and
dream. I was taught to use the fan, which is thought to be too alluring
for little girls to handle. I was qualified in the use of both needle
and wand, and selected my personal colors with the herald.
The palestra drilled me in the Quadrille, and
long-waited ceremony
commenced: all the maidens of my city performed our figures on a
ten-acre-wide plate of energy, with a plate oppositely charged hanging
above, a thousand athletic virgins filled with vitality, our fair young
limbs flew up with bacchant cries; our skirts and streaming hairs were
banners; our slender feet were thunder.
We wove our youth and purity into the ancient energy
pattern, while
stored force of a million years rippled across the motions of our
contredanse. When I stepped from the plate, and the Sanguinarians
confirmed I was fertile, the Humanitarians that I was un-deviant; and
the Judge of Change offered the paten. We all pulled up our hair, girls
no longer, and waited to be Presented.
The only mar was that I had not yet been Named. My House
still kept the
calendar of the Lesser Redoubt, and so the Quarter Cusp (as we reckoned
it) was still a month and two days away, despite that I was Presented
with my troupe. It was an awkward protocol: I was carrying a fan, but
had to drink children’s wine, which is nine-tenths water. I had a
needle in my sash-case, but it was uncharged. Little things like that.
So much had changed.
When Polynices left, Haemon had been no more than one of
several
friends of my brother before he left. A year later, he and I were
promised to each other, waiting only for my Naming-day to wed.
16.
The last time I saw my father alive was when he came to
visit me in
prison. I was high born, and so my prison consisted of my word that I
would not leave my chambers. I suppose in times when the art of the
Mind Glass was forgotten, or the deceptions of the Thaumaturges were
remembered, a lady’s unsupported word could not be trusted. But as it
was, my word was enough, and so all my books and memory-globes, dresses
and thinking disks were here to amuse me, had I been able to be amused.
All my soft furniture, silk hangings and serene light-images were the
same to me as if they had been the bare steel walls of a penance cell.
Naturally, I was livid with rage when my father entered
the chamber. He
was led by the hand by Optimina, a woman even older then he is.
He coughed, and said to her softly, “Is that noise my
daughter?”
She murmured, “Yes, lord.”
“Find me a chair. Not near enough for her to bite.”
“No, lord.” And the old woman led him over to a large
chair. He felt
the arms and sides for a moment so that he knew which way it was
facing, and gingerly lowered himself into it.
I said in a ringing voice, “Has civilization reached a
deepest nadir,
then, that the innocent are kept in chains for speaking no more than
simple truth?”
Father muttered to Optimina, “Is she in chains?”
She lowered her head to his ear. “No, lord. She is using
an expression.”
“Ah. I was about to commend my partisans for their
zeal.” He raised his
head and said, “Why did you imagine that, being of a privileged
bloodline, you should be allowed to dispute the law, which binds all
others in the Last Redoubt?”
I said, “What law? There is but an edict of your own,
saying Polynices
may not return. Inhuman! You condemned him. It would have been only
matter of hours before some Manticore sniffing the dun air would scent
the blood of all the giants he has slain, or one of the Silent Ones
would pause in its errands along the great road, and turn its hood
toward where he hid. Once discovered, some Great Power of the darkness
would come to drink his soul like rice wine. Your word doomed him to
Destruction.”
He shook his head wearily. “That opinion, worthy of a
girl of your
tender years and unremarkable accomplishments, would have contravened
no law, had you kept it within your boudoir. Instead you spoke it to a
pamphleteer, and it was passed to the hour-slips, and soon became the
talk of all the cities of mankind. Of course there were those, eager
for the approval of so high-born a lady, who took your weightless words
as weightiest commands: a group of bullies from North Pantry-works
rushed the gate, and beat the Night Watch into submission: the
valve-wheel was turned, and, in a moment, without the lanterns being
doused or the thoughts of men disciplined to silence, both airlocks and
thought-locks stood wide. They cheered.”
He almost smiled then, but forced his lips into a line
instead.
Father’s organization had been telling the people for months what a
hero Polynices was. Of course they cheered him. No one was allowed to
tell any other version of the tale.
Yet it still pleased him.
Father finished in a grim voice: “The idiots cheered
your brother, and
their voices rang out into the Night. Your brother and his two monsters
entered, while the Dun Giants stood blinking in astonishment, no doubt
fearing a trap.”
“I am pleased to see that there are men of red
blood still living
in this decayed and unspirited age!”
Father listened silently and nodded slowly. “Your words
confirm that
you willed the outcome of the event your speeches set in motion. All
the elements of a charge of sedition to inhumanity are present.”
“I am free born, my family is not in debt to the
water-works or
air-pump, the power-house nor the mess. I am not indentured. How then
can any law presume to rule my lips, when no law can rule my spirit?”
“If men were wise enough not to open doors to monsters,
we would need
no law to make it unlawful to urge so horrid an act.”
To my surprise, Optimina, his servant woman, spoke up:
“Young mistress,
hear me. There have been ages, many of them, when the
mind-science was much advanced. Men of those happy times lived without
the need for law, nor was there a Castellan; nor were men split into
high ranks and low, for men served each man zealously, without any need
to reward his heirs with dignities. An age like ours is very
rare, along all the great aeons since the Pyramid arose, and we await
some Dreamer of times past or times to come to recollect the lost
sciences of mind-perfection to us. Until then, our Pyramid is divided
into high and low, and the high are like the lamps and gongs which call
us to quarters; they are the alarms that say where a breach has been
made. Your voice, even yours, my lady, must be governed by the law,
lest you give out a false alarm, and call brave men to dark and
reckless deeds.”
I was aghast for a moment. “Father? Will this crone
upbraid me?”
He pursed his lips and sucked his teeth to keep himself
from smiling.
“She is not high born and may say what she would. Unlike you. And she
will speak wise words. Unlike you. Come! I have prepared an encyclical,
which you must sign, and give out to the hour-slips, to post in all the
hatches of the drinking houses and public rotundas. It reviles
your brother and condemns those who aided him. There is little else I
can do. We may be able to scrape enough sewage from your name to make
your presentable for an alliance of marriage of some sort, perhaps not
as grand as once I had hoped.”
I said stiffly: “I will publish no ill of my brother.”
“Come: his rank is gone. Eteocles will take his place,
and be my heir.”
“Dawn will come before I sign!”
Father slowly climbed to his feet. He tilted his head
toward the door:
a circuit must have caught his thought-sending, for the door chimed and
opened, and Uncle Creon entered, followed by two legates, Kratos and
Bia.
They bowed to him.
Father said, “The girl is reticent. Her crime is
Conspiracy to Breach,
a deed which threatens the integrity of the Pyramid and the survival of
the human race. What is within my power to do?”
Creon said with surprise, “Liege? Surely the crime is
accessory, not
conspiracy.”
“We are lucky my son had wit enough to upbraid the
rioters this foolish
girl stirred up and drive his beasts into the Quarantine Chamber: we
can still claim he did not bring them fully inside the Last Redoubt.
The Chamber is hollowed out from the hundred-yard thick armor plate
itself, inside the outer lock but not within the inner; a subtle point
of law which might allow us to pardon him, if public sentiment permits.
It is a slender thread, and all we have. At the moment, we can call the
crime attempted, rather than complete. This will allow me to deflect
the full force of the law from my children; but I still need a
sufficient penalty for the lesser crime to convince the multitude that
my justice is fair. What is within my power?”
Kratos answered, “The ancient practice was to use a
mental correction.
But the last Soul Glass was shattered six hundred years ago.”
Father said, “Tell me not what I cannot do, but what I
can.”
Kratos said, “The penalties affixed to nobles are
reduction,
humiliation, rationing, abnegation and cloister. Or you may issue a
Bill of Attainder, which revokes generation privileges.”
“Gah! You are speaking of my unborn grandchildren. I
will not corrupt
my own blood. And do not bother to say I can blot her family shield,
for that escutcheon is mine own as well. With such a stigma, I would be
lucky to wed her to a sewer worker or pamphleteer.”
Bai Bia spoke up. His voice was soft and sinister. “Were
she common
born, there is branding, marring, and flogging. All are quickly
accomplished without drain of public resource.”
“It is not meet that any principle of correction should
shape to the
making of human signposts of pain for the benefit of others.”
Bia said, “Exulted, your beneficence does you credit,
but you stand at
the tower-top of a tradition more ancient and bloody than such nice
scruples know. The flayed skin of one who attempted to exit the pyramid
unprepared still hangs on the inward face the Greater Gate, a horrid
warning to all.”
“And the era which did that deed is still reviled for
its
nearly-nightlandish inhumanity. I will not make the memory of our age
even darker, by putting the fairer skin of a female beside the hide of
a criminal, and mine own daughter. Historians have enough to condemn
when comparing our aeon to others.”
Creon said heavily, “Sir, history will recall that few
other ages,
aside from this, suffered the gene-darkening due to influences from the
Quiet City, and few had their mathematicians confirm that the
degeneration of the race into abhumanism was already much advanced.
Without the eugenics laws, in a mere twenty thousand years, we would
have de-evolved into beast-things, and more cities would be deserted
than they are: without the hierarchy, we could not enforce the eugenics
laws.”
Father turned his ear: “What would you do, brother?”
“You are always too lax, brother.”
Father said, “We dare not use the law to kill. For human
to kill human
is unheard-of in civilized times: an abomination. It will pollute the
thought-streams for ninety generations, both consciously and
subconsciously, and mars the cycle of incarnation and reincarnation.”
“Then let her be locked in an empty city, without water
or victual.”
“Death is not a penalty ours laws inflict.”
“But it would not be inflicted! Oh no. It would merely
be…” and now
Creon smiled his toothy smile, “…allowed. To cut off feed and water is
not to execute: it imposes only gentle slumber. She has betrayed the
safety of the pyramid. Why should we take extraordinary measures to
keep her alive?”
“Impossible,” said father curtly.
Creon did not like being crossed. If father had been
able to see the
look on Creon’s face at that moment, he would have locked Creon into a
dark and empty city on some deserted level, and left him to starve.
17.
I spoke up. “Gentlemen, this little drama no doubt would
be convincing
to a girl of lesser wit, but I can count. I know my birth-hour. I have
been presented, and I have danced, but in the eyes of the law, not for
a week do I reach the age of my majority: until then, I am a child. Our
laws forbid corruption of the blood, attainder, reduction, or
abnegation or for those of tender years, and certainly our law holds
children free from threat to life and limb.”
Creon said, “As a child, the law permits your father to
beat you with a
rod, provided only he breaks no bones.”
I tossed back my head, and glared up at his eye. “The
hour-slips will
be eager for the details of his cruelty!”
(It was still distracting to toss my head defiantly and
not feel hair
slap against my neck. I was not used to it. It made me realize how
often I made that head gesture. Maybe it is not one a grown woman
should make.)
Creon’s lips drew back from his teeth. He said in a tone
of sinister
patience, “Countless millions of men live in this huge hive: we cannot
control them unless they bow. They will not bow if we seem weak. If you
break with us, we seem divided, hence weak. So, right or wrong, you
cannot be seen to defy our family in public. It will convulse the
Pyrtaneum, and undo all the life’s work of your family.”
I said archly: “Is that so, uncle? Then do not cross me.”
Father whispered something to Optimina. Her voice was
louder than his,
and I heard her reply, “Her expression is much like your own, lord. She
means to have her will.”
I said sharply, “By Creon’s logic, you all must support
my brother, and
close ranks around him. It is Creon who says any breach within our
ranks will shake the public order.”
Father raised his hand, saying, “Enough sophistry. You
know the many
pains and punishments, either in my public office as your liege, or in
my private office as your father, are in my hand to deal to you: yet
your seal upon this encyclical will obviate such need. Surely the
reputation and honor of our family, the highest of all high families,
weighs heavily on you.”
“My brother is of blood as ancient as my own,” I said.
“He is a hero
who survived a dark land no one in this chamber, no one in this city,
no one in this Great Redoubt, was bold enough to tread. He brought back
the cruelest beasts of the Night Land fawning and crawling at his foot.
You should erect a monument in the Agora taller than the figure of
Andros!”
“Daughter, give way in this, or I must punish you. Come!
Your seal upon
the document, that all high-born may with one voice condemn those who
venture Out, and censure dreams of ancient heroism left better dead
beneath dead years.”
I was appalled. For a moment I could not speak. Then:
“Will you take
back your word? You assented to the expedition. You lauded the young
men who donned the heavy armor and charged their great weapons, and you
blessed them as crept softly from our gates into the icy gloom. Did you
not also yearn to discover if the ancient lore was sound, that there
might be a Place of Refuge, an escape from the Night Lands, some place
away to the west, beyond the Land of Abhumans, beyond the lidless eyes
of the Watching Things? Have you never wondered where rests the
terminus of the great highway that crosses our so near the base of our
Redoubt? Polynices says that humans built it, in times past. The Last
Redoubt must praise those who discover this mystery, and add to the sum
of the wisdom of Mankind. You know this, Father: you said it. Your word
condoned the expedition!”
He shook his head sadly. “You know Polynices has gone
far beyond
anything I allowed or dreamt. For the remaining four million years of
history, the only thing children will remember of our age, when all
else is smothered beneath the pile of time, is that this era allowed
two Night Hounds inside the armor.”
“But you sent him Out, he and his men, calling them
heroes!”
“That word I spoke then was fit for then.” He said
heavily, “Then is
the past, and now is the present. Now another word we all must speak.”
I said. “Am I the daughter of a Castellan, or only of a
politician?”
Creon growled, “Liege, time flees us. Let her be
half-rationed: the
hour-slips will only report with glee that a rich daughter of the aerie
lofts must eat a poor man’s meal.”
Father nodded a slow, heavy nod, his face not pointed
toward any of us
in particular, his pale and filmy eyes seeming more blank than usual.
Bia stepped to the door of the chamber, and whispered to
a clerk, who
ran off.
Father’s shoulder slumped, and his frame seemed to
shrink in on
himself. “It will not matter. This is all farce; this is all vanity.
Even if my daughter and all the ghosts of the sunlight days were to
dance from deck to deck, singing the chorus of condemnation with voices
like thunder, and waving white banners of silk and red, faces painted
like demogorgons, it would not sway the Populists. The world can never
forgive what has been done. The Optimate party is finished, our phylum
is finished, our family is done. Authority and rule slip from my
fingers like a lump of the drinking powder exposed to air: it fizzes
instantly to liquid, and no fist can grasp it. It will mean the end of
the Bloodline Laws. The degenerations of the race resume.”
Kratos said softly, “Despair not, my Liege! Even the
common-born know
the need to excise the diseases Outer Forces have introduced into our
gene plasm. No mother yearns for an unworthy child, large-toothed,
small-skulled, and dark with hair!”
A look of regret crossed the face of Kratos as this last
word escaped
him, and I saw the glance of apprehension he darted, first at me, and
at my lustrous dark hair, so unlike the fair hair of those not of my
house, and then at my father.
This was the first time I realized what must have been
obvious to my
brothers and my sister, all this life.
They thought we were atavisms; through-backs; lesser
beings. The envy
of those who had no blood of Mirdath in their veins convinced them that
we were archaic; that we were not just of the second race of man, but
of a lesser race. No doubt this comforted them when they resented our
rule.
Another thing my father did not see was Uncle Creon nod
toward Kratos,
a mere tilt of the eyes, a small motion of the fingers, which told
Kratos not to worry. It was a look of camaraderie, a look of agreement.
Creon’s words had double meaning when he said, “The rule
of the family
of Andros will not fail. The Bloodline Laws will be upheld: the people
see the need for them. The human race will not commit suicide. It is
human instinct to follow self interest.”
Father spoke in the most sad and hollow voice I have
ever heard come
from a human throat. All his years of bearing the burden of the
Castellanship, his hidden fears, seemed to speak in that moment, and
his words came slowly forth, strangely monotonous: “No, brother! How
little you know of the instincts of man. We will embrace suicide so
willingly, when we die for love. The young maid thinks nothing of her
grandchildren’s genes when her unworthy suitor calls. Mobs go mad when
some demagogue arises, promising them revenge against their betters,
adoring him; and this is love as well. Men will love anything to which
they put their hands: even my son loves the monsters that slay us, and
he becomes a monster himself, his thoughts and dreams drifting ever
further from the human norm; even my daughter loves him loyally,
despite what Polynices has become. The rulers and the people actually
salutary to us, wholesome, wise and good, those we do not love, but
scorn. Such is human instinct, brother: we are unnatural creatures.”
Creon said only: “Not so, sir. Brother-love is the
firmest of
sentiments.”
I had a woebegone look on my face at that moment,
hearing Father’s
toneless voice. If Optimina had only told him what I looked like then,
things would have gone differently. I was opening my mouth to speak,
when the Registrar (who had entered the chamber with the log book in
his hand, and the master seal) asked Father what name to put on the
order for my reduction in rations.
“Name?”
“Your daughter’s name, sir? Her adult name.”
This stirred him from his woe: his expression grew hard
and cold. “Let
her be called Antigone, for she opposes her family and her bloodline,
and acts always against her birth.”
I suppose if Optimina had looked at my face then, she
would have seen a
look of brittle pride mirroring that which shone from my Father’s face.
Païs would have asked forgiveness and tried to make
amends.
Antigone never would.
Horrid name. I must carry it henceforth until I die.
18.
It was Creon, not long after, who finally convinced
father to visit the
prison of his son, and to see close at hand the two monsters he had
brought in with him. The watchmen were dismissed, or so I later heard,
and only Creon’s partisans, men whose faces Father never saw, whose
hearts he never knew, were in the steel-floored quarantine area with
Polynices and his two Night Hounds.
The story of how it was that father and his maid were
destroyed, and
yet Creon and his heavily armed men escaped unhurt, was never
convincing to me.
19.
The popular opinion swung to support Creon once he
announced the
abolition of the indenture debt. The public treasury was drained, and
the lowest of the low born, armed with staves and cudgels, now cheered
for Creon whenever he appeared, and set upon any noble or his entourage
who opposed Creon in the Pyrtaneum.
There were tumults, and the Architects shut down power
and lights to
cities up in arms. Doors were locked and air turned stale while
angry parties negotiated surrenders, and Adepts with the few working
Mind Glasses we still had confirmed their oaths and scanned for mental
reservations.
Even the Master Monstruwacan was harassed when he
emerged from his high
tower, though as the bravoes closed in on him with ugly words and
gestures, he drew himself up and spoke the Master Word. The young men
remembered their humanity, and fell back, ashamed and astonished, and
the Master Monstruwacan gathered his robes of office around him, and
walked from between them, not hurrying.
Perhaps such things had happened when my father seized
the command,
during the food emergencies of so many years ago. I had not been born,
and the only accounts I knew of such things came from the witness of
flatterers, from accounts courtiers loyal to him told.
How little I knew of him! Now, when it was too late, far
too late, did
I wonder. He could have answered with a word, had I ever spoken
to him as a daughter should do; answers now forever lost to me.
What had he been in youth? Did Father unleash rioters,
and use the
hunger of the needy to wrestle high command away from Laius his father,
and seize supreme eminence for himself? If so, it was a ghastly deed. A
mob is a monster, as hungry as a Night Hound, destructive and wanton
and without a soul.
How like Polynices he was after all.
20.
During the time of the tumults, I stole from my
chambers, and crept
down the long, cold deserted stairs of the Main Flight to the
Archivists Quarters. The Pyrtaneum was dissolved, and the Tribunes were
arrested, and so no one knew who or what was in charge. The Master of
the Library, Aristophanes, was willing to help me, or, I should say,
fearful not to help me, not knowing how high my position might be, once
the fighting ended.
In the archive, in an insulated cabinet an apprentice
opened for me, I
inspected the Time Glass which had been focused on the chamber where my
father died, its penetrating rays reaching back to the hour in
question. There were two Chronometricians present to work the glass,
which even I was not permitted to touch.
21.
The image in the surface of the glass is blurred and
smoky, as is often
the case when weapons powered by the Earth-Current are discharged in a
confined space. Only a few clear images are preserved in the smoky
glass. One is the image of my brother Polynices, a stern look on his
face, putting out his hand and calling the two monsters to his heel.
The vast and ungainly Night Hounds fell back, their jaws awash with
human blood, their eyes like coals from a grate, but they crouched
behind Polynices.
The image shows Creon and his men at the chamber door,
each man with a
glittering Diskos in his gauntlet, the spinning blades held out left
and right, the butts of the weapons grounded against the deck, the
shafts fully extended, the whole squad ready to receive a charge. What
words they exchanged, the glass could not record.
The blur on the floor is surely the corpse of my father.
Mercifully,
all the details are indistinct. One shadow could be a spray of blood,
or it could be his torn cloak, or perhaps his hand, held at an odd
angle, fingers spread.
The last clear image, from a minute later, and blurred
somewhat with
the others, shows Polynices stepping forward, his face set and grim,
and his monsters looming up flanking him, rising to their feet and
opening their great mouths; and before them is the silhouette of Creon
cringing, and his men falling away to the left and right. The was a
flash of weapons as the men spun their Diskos blades up to speed, and
the image reconstructed in the glass again turns into a mass of blurs.
That last image, though, one half-second before the
shadows swallow
all, is a haunting one, and I asked the prentices to trifle the glass
by increments slowly back and forth to study it.
Polynices, arms spread and slightly raised, rests one
hand lightly on
the manes of each of his monsters as the three step forward. His beasts
flank him. Their vast force is under his control. He looks so proud of
them, so pleased, so in love.
He does not look down as he steps over the body of our
father.
© John C
Wright 1 Aug 2005
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