The Cry of the Night Hound

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.