© Brett Davidson   The Siege Of Humanity

 
By Sean McLachlan

A graphic novelisation of this story is under composition

The laughter comes low, rolling through the steep ravines of the eastern mountains out of the Unknown Lands beyond, to the Valley of the Hounds. As it echoes off the rocks it seems to gather strength. It quickens like an ancient tide as it rolls over the low foothills, before rushing on swift mocking tones through the Night Land to pummel the steel slopes of the Last Redoubt.

I stand calmly upon the Watch Deck at the apex of the Great Pyramid, also known as the Last Redoubt of Mankind, that massive fortress of steel that humanity built so many centuries ago. I am one of the Watchmen, the last of Mankind's numberless armies, who stand vigil over the poor remnants of a vanishing race. We guard against the creatures of the Night Land, the fell beasts that slink and howl in the Outer Darkness. They are out there, beyond the protective glowing ring of the Earth Current, which casts prohibitive rays on half-hidden, inhuman forms and pale, lunar eyes.

We watch, and listen. We watch the strange fires of the Giants' Kilns, and the stranger hulks that gambol around them. We watch for the abhumans, those dimly seen minions of the Evil Powers that now stalk our world, those creatures who also watch and listen, hoping that we will flag in our vigil.

They have been more active of late, slinking furtively between the shadows and the sickly red light from their mysterious labors. At times they rise up in full view, and gesticulate in an arcane and threatening manner towards the Great Pyramid, across the many miles of sable shadows that stand between us.

It is not they who laugh, who have laughed these past thirty thousand years and more, although mock us they surely do from their freedom in the limitless blackness. No, it is a more awesome entity, an Evil Power. Some say it is the disembodied soul of one of the four Watchers: towering beings of stone that stand sentinel like four sphinxes on each side of the Great Pyramid, far beyond the moat of protective energy that is the Earth Current. Others say it is some other power, never seen by Man, which controls and masses the forces of the dark against us. I have listened to the laughter, I have listened long, and I have my own ideas as to its origin.

I am not the commander of these men. The title of Master of the Watch honors another. For although I am the most respected, and by long and bitter experience the most qualified, I am not to be trusted. I am old, far older than the old men of the Council who decide who will lead the Watch. I am older even than the Great Pyramid. I am as old as humanity itself. I am old enough to remember the ball of flame that shone in the sky and was called the Sun. I remember when night was just a passing horror, always to be replaced with day, its nocturnal terrors melting away in the first warm light of dawn.

I am old, and my ideas are not those of men who have known only night and watching and listening. I am old, and I remember when men would rather fight than hide. I am old, though this body I currently inhabit is aged only eight years and twenty, and I am not to be trusted.

The laughter subsides, followed by a faint rumbling. I squint eastwards, and see a small avalanche tumbling down one of the ravines. The laughter has caused it, as it always does. Each time that unseen thing bursts forth in derision, the mountains that separate us grow a little thinner.

I look up, a direction to which those who are not Reawakened from an earlier time do not look, for it has been many millions of years since anything has flown in the thin chill air of this sunless world. I look up, and remember.

I remember a brilliant sun in a pale primeval sky hammering down upon the wide bright spaces of the savanna. A river flowed there, blue and fresh and sparkling in the blaze of day. The waters teemed with fish, and its banks were crisscrossed by the narrow trails of gazelles that paced down to its edge to drink.

It was the dawn of civilization, when Man first ceased to stare out into the darkness beyond the campfires, but built walls to keep the Sumerian night out. We retreated within them - our first guarded cities.

At a curve in the river stood the walled city of Uhrduk. It was peopled by men and women who caught the fish and hunted the gazelle, and increased the bounty of the river by channeling its waters to soak the rocky fields of the savanna so that they could bring forth rich crops of gourds and tubers and golden wheat. The river was a means of contact as well. To the north and south were towns distant and strange, from which men who spoke alien tongues plied barques laden with stores of myrhh and berberine in exchange for our rich surplus of food and useful things crafted by our skilled artisans. For Uhrduk was the greatest of the towns, our walls the highest, our people the most numerous, our goods the most prized. For greenstone axes and sharp obsidian darts did they come, and finely curved atlatls made from the leg bones of gazelles, and rich necklaces of shell, brought in by traders across the savanna from the Endless Water, and fashioned into the likeness of beasts and spirits by the craftsmen of Uhrduk.

But enemies we had then--the nomads. Those too uncivilized to know town or planting stick, those whose only roof was the rough hide of some slaughtered beast, who hated the towns for their luxury and wealth. Often they attacked the settlements along the river, laying waste to their fields, breaking through their walls of mudbrick, carrying off their goods and women. But they dared not touch Uhrduk. Our walls were of stone, and they stood to the height of two full-grown men. Stout they were, and no breach could be made in them. I had seen to that, for I, leader of the warriors of Uhrduk, had built them. The nomads feared and hated us, and dared not raid our lands without gathering in large numbers. But gather they did.

"It is time."

A young voice brings me out of the long-dead light and back into the darkness. I turn, and gaze upon he who has spoken.

It is one of the cadets, young and impulsive, but wiser than many of his elders. He swears loyalty to me rather than to the stolid and cautious man the Council has seen fit to make our commander. This youthful cadet follows me, for I have a strategy that offers more than watching and waiting. He follows me because he knows my many lives have given me the wisdom of a vast accumulation of years.

We take leave of the Watch Deck, leaving to the other Watchmen the duty of monitoring the Night Land, leaving them to their recording of the Laughter, their speculations about the new, fifth, Watcher, that may or may not be approaching from the unknown South. What does it matter? New forces will gather and gather, eternally.

We enter the Watch Deck's single elevator, an oblong box of metal that plunges us from the thousandth floor deep into the innermost recesses of the Great Pyramid. The brilliant lights of the interior floors, each its own raucous and teeming city, flicker past unseen as we stand within the close-set casing.

I think upon the young man beside me. He is young, and eager for battle, though battle he has never known. He is like so many young men I have led, young men who had watched the enemy from stout walls and were not lacking in spirit when the time came for them to defend their home.

The sun shone bright then, upon the massive walls that ringed Constantinople. It, like Uhrduk, was a glorious city built upon a curve of water. But instead of flanking a primeval savanna, Constantinople was built upon the fabled peninsula that harbored the shimmering waters of the Golden Horn, where the Bosphorus met the Sea of Marmara. It was the easternmost bastion of Christendom facing the infidel horde of the Ottomans.

It was the year of Our Lord 1453, when years were marked in such a fashion, and I was the True Emperor of the Romans. Warm sunlight shone down upon the verdant Thracian fields of my Empire of Byzantium, and upon the red-tiled roofs of churches that housed columns of porphyry supporting arches bejeweled with luminous mosaics of golden tesserae. The Sun sent flares sparkling across the rippling waters that lapped the shores of both Europe and Asia, two hostile lands barely five bowshots apart.

The sun was brilliant then, but it was dimmer than when it blazed upon Uhrduk so many millennia before. But strong it still was, and strong it would remain for millions of years, as only one who has been Reawakened many times could know. The light above was dimming, but the brave knights of Constantinople could not know this, and their eyes were not cast upwards, but across that thin strait of water to the camp of the gathering enemy.

Many times the Sultan had hurled his men against our sheer walls, and many times we had thrown him back with bow and fire, lo these many centuries. Our walls were strong, stronger by far than long-lost Uhrduk's, but we fought alone against the infidel, with no Christian lord coming to our aid, and the Sultan was gathering a fearsome host.

We emerge from the elevator deep in the nether regions of the Great Pyramid, close to its base in one of the lower, more decayed and decadent levels. Millions live here, as is the case with all the thousand floors of the Last Redoubt, but their character is different from their cousins of the higher altitudes. Their walls are featureless, for even the smallest window is not allowed in the lower levels for fear it could be used as an entry way for some creature of the Night Land able to cross the Earth Current, although none had ever survived the attempt. The closeness of life in the lower floors has lent a dissipation, a listlessness and lack of vigilance to their character. This is perfect for our purposes.

The cadet leads me along a broad metal esplanade to a transport station. We board an autocar to take us to the rendezvous. We seat ourselves, and while the cadet works the controls, I watch the view as the autocar slowly picks up speed. Parks, stadia, residences, and avenues speed past.

The public lighting on this floor is dim, as if in sympathy for the waning willpower of its people. The dusky hues of shadowed proscenia and marbled courtyards bring my reveries back to an earlier time, long after Uhrduk and Constantinople, to another city, now also dead and turned to dust, forgotten by all but me, but undreamed by any man who knew Uhrduk or Constantinople.

The Sun had dimmed much by that time. Its wan light flickered feebly over a featureless plain of cracked rock and fused glass. No life that Man would recognize as natural lived upon that plain, once blasted by an inferno of heat but now growing chill as the sustaining rays of the Sun gave way to an ever-deepening dusk.

At the curve of a dry valley that had once held a broad river stood Heliopolis, the largest of the declining cities of the Darkening Age. It was an ancient name, hoary even in the days when I ruled Byzantium, but it was an apt one. In those days of the dying light Man's faith had turned from the clay idols of Uhrduk and the dark-limned icons of Constantinople, and looked to the Sun itself for hope.

In Heliopolis there was no electric light. Instead, through a giant crystal lens suspended high above the city, and a clever arrangement of manifold mirrors, sunlight was magnified and reflected into every room of that vast metropolis. We, like the denizens of the Great Pyramid so many millions of years later, were harried on all sides by the evil forces of an unclean land. They were the Changed, the decayed remnant of humanity that still lived on the Darkening Plain. Though no clean human could survive for long on that blasted landscape, they seemed to thrive and grow in number. Constantly they assailed our walls, and the Sun died overhead, and though our prayers for its rebirth felt hollow in our hearts, none of us would be denied the privilege of sunlight.

The Master Lens refracted the crimson rays of the guttering Sun into a myriad of pale hues that bathed the city with a brilliant incandescence. Entire neighborhoods were soaked with deep violet or burning sapphire. In other spots, at the intersections of two or more faces, shimmering rainbows played endlessly over rooftops and alleyways, catching crystal sculptures and setting them ablaze in vivid sparkling color. The houses were daubed with bright paints mixed with mica, so the colors of the walls would blend with the shades descending from above and the mica would shine pure and bright with the tone of the neighborhood, rich and warm as rubies, cool and clean as tourmaline, pure and cold as diamonds.

At the city center, at the nexus of those varicolored lanes and pulsating buildings, at the point where all the planes of the Master Lens intersected, stood the Plaza of Rainbows. There the variegated rays clashed and broke and a thousand thousand brilliant colors played over flagstones of white marble, the distant death throes of the fading sun reflected in coursing hues that writhed and shimmered and blended into a controlled explosion of color, a blazing jewel half a kilometer wide, a final defiance against the fading of the light.

At its center was a simple circle of black upon which no color could play. This was the secret to our might: a device of ancient manufacture, another lens, not of pure crystal, but of an unknown material, its secret long since lost, with the smooth glasslike texture of obsidian but a hundred times more black. It absorbed the light and converted it to energy to power the machines that hummed and throbbed deep below the city. It was from here that our deadly weapons, the Incinerators, got their power, and to here that all our varied devices were tethered for life.

Beautiful was our city, fairer than the bright river and open savanna that surrounded Uhrduk, fairer even than the golden churches of Constantinople. But it was a city of sorrow. For although we commanded powerful weapons, we lay isolated from our brothers in the few scattered cities of Mankind. Alone we were, alone against the gathering forces of a decaying world.

The others are waiting for us at the terminus. The cadet slows the autocar to a halt and we are greeted by two dozen cadets and Watchmen. They salute me, and tell me all is in readiness. I study their faces. Set features. Hard, resolute eyes. They are ready to follow me--a leader who offers them something more than endless hiding and watching, a leader who offers them victory.

We make our way with haste through an abandoned square to the goal of our meeting, the Museum, a vast collection of artifacts and records from long-dead ages of Man. The Caretaker, an aged scholar who I have befriended, is waiting by the entrance to meet us. His white eyebrows rise and his black eyes glitter in recognition as he beholds me. The Caretaker is the only soul outside our inner circle to whom I have entrusted our plan. He has studied the ancient technologies of war for his entire life, taking especial interest of the period right after the final fall into Outer Darkness, when the craft of making weapons was at its most advanced. He has come to the inevitable conclusion that aeons of defensive inaction can only lead to folly for the defender. It was under his tutelage that I discovered our salvation, Man's means of victory over the dark forces of the Night Land.

The Caretaker leads us through the displays. We shoulder aside the few loiterers who stand gazing into the glass cases. My eyes do not rest on these soft citizens who while away their time studying trinkets of bygone eras, while the noose tightens around their necks. Nor do I look long at the displays. I know the artifact I seek. A sideways glance shows me some ancient playthings, a shelf of downy stuffed creatures and a half dozen miniature warriors made of tin, painted in the colors of long-forgotten battalions.

We turn a corner into an area dedicated to the simpler tools of an even more remote age. I walk with purpose, urging my followers along, eager to be at our work, indifferent to the labored breathing of the Caretaker hobbling by my side. I take no heed of the crude, primitive objects until a sight summons up a distant memory and stops me short. There, in a case to my right, is a simple axe of flint, preserved by the Earth from the halcyon days when the Sun shone bright and the only evil that existed was in the hearts of other men.

The nomads attacked Uhrduk at dawn, as the young Sun rose over the golden grass of the savanna. They came in numbers never before seen, throngs of ragged men who hurled themselves against our walls, seeking hand and toe holds to climb to the top. The men and women of Uhrduk threw stones and flint-tipped darts down on them. The attackers hurtled into the crowd below, their brains dashed out or throats transfixed by sharp spears. The nomads threw spears and stones back at us, but few of us fell. We were protected by a chest-high parapet of my own design, a little wall atop the large one, to protect the citizens of Uhrduk.

A group of nomads battered at the thick wooden gate with a log, but a score of picked warriors under my command threw swift javelins from atlatls. The javelins flew like birds and hissed like serpents, and soon the nomads were writhing in their death throes. Their simple battering ram thudded to the ground. In an instant it was picked up again, and again the air hissed with our far-flying darts of flint.

All along the wall, nomads tried to climb up, and although none made it, there were always more to take their place.

"Come," the Caretaker whispers. "This way."

He leads us through a small door into the restricted storage area of the Museum. We descend a spiral staircase and find ourselves on an old metal catwalk suspended high above a cavernous chamber so colossal its utmost reaches disappear at the limits of our vision.

Only a part of the Museum's collection is open to the populace. Beneath lies an echoing hall called the Chamber of Artifacts, containing a diverse array of machines of obscure use. Immense wheels attached to sealed chambers. Glass cylinders in which glowing shades coil and whip, giving off the smell of ozone and burnt resin. Squat sealed vats that slosh and rumble and emit loud, urgent messages in forgotten languages.

I glance at these mysteries with only passing interest, for I know what I seek. And there, past a huge beast of pistons and tubes, whose innards of copper wire and black coils lie disemboweled on the floor, we come upon what we knew we would find. There, in the half-light of the Chamber of Artifacts, stands one of the Current Cannon. It is a massive weapon, a behemoth of metal and conduits. Six giant metal domes, each as high as a house, flank an immense central cylinder a hundred fathoms long and a quarter that wide. The cannon is set to one side, facing the eastern wall like some primeval beast turned to steel. At its snout is a platform swathed in wires. At one edge of the platform is a control console and a seat. In front, gleaming with oil, is a broad barrel of cold steel. It is set at a high angle, as if at attention, perfectly preserved by the ministrations of the Caretaker.

We rush along the catwalk, eager to get to our prize. The catwalk shudders under our hurrying feet, and we approach more cautiously. Once above the Current Cannon, we descend a clattering spiral staircase to the main floor. We approach the artifact slowly now, with reverence. I come upon it, and run my hand along the cool smooth steel. Then I turn to the Caretaker and order him to instruct my men on how to connect it with the power grid.

The Cannon is set between two partition walls. The back and top can be sealed off with a steel curtain that rises from the floor, curving overhead to form a roof. Thus the Cannon can be completely cut off from the Chamber of Artifacts. At the wall in front of the Cannon is a massive gun port, fully ten fathoms wide and as tall as a man, fused long ago when this weapon was abandoned. I order one team to revive the weapon, and another to cut through the soldering that has sealed the gun port all these long years. A third team sets to work reanimating the moveable back wall and roof.

As the men set about their tasks, I walk idly around the ancient machine. Before long, I reach the gun port, where the eastern wall of the Great Pyramid itself blocks me.

I press my palm against the smooth surface and gaze up at the inwardly sloping plates as they rise far overhead. A chill runs through my spine as I think of the few paces of metal between me and the Night Land. An impressive wall, but I had defended impressive walls before, and against foes not a tenth as fearsome as the Evil Powers that were now arrayed against me. I press my cheek against the metal, then my entire body, and feel the cold of the outer darkness seep through the thick plating to numb my bones. For a moment, although I know it to be only fancy, I think I hear the Laughter resonating through the metal to mock me.

As the sun rose over Constantinople, the Turks prepared their immense cannon. It had been pulled into position the previous day by fifteen pair of oxen. The barrel was nearly thirty feet long and was said to launch stone balls weighing 1200 pounds. It had been built by a bastard Hungarian who first offered his services to me, naming an outrageous price that he knew my declining city could not afford. Now he worked for the Sultan, who had heaped him with riches taken from my lands.

A Turkish captain gave the signal. A soldier lit the cannon's fuse. Fire gouted from its wide mouth and a billowing cloud of saltpeter obscured our view of the beast. The air shook with a terrific thunder, followed immediately by a cracking sound at the point where the cannon ball smacked into the ancient masonry. The wall trembled. The men defending it gasped and offered a hurried prayer to God and the Blessed Mother, then broke into a cheer when they beheld the wall still standing, its surface slightly cracked. The smoke cleared and the cheer died. The Turks were reloading.

A shout awakens me from my reverie. The young cadet comes clattering along the catwalk yelling gleefully that he has found another Cannon a little farther on, and boxes of spare parts to meet all our needs. There comes an ominous groaning, and the catwalk sways, and we shout for him to take care. The supports give way. The aged platform hurtles to the floor below. The cadet is dashed upon the cold gray metal, and lies still before us.

We gather around him in silence. After a long moment I pull my Diskos from my belt and hold it reversed over the young man's body. The others followed suit, gathering around in a circle and saluting our comrade with our Diskoi reversed, in the fashion of the Watchmen when one of our number has died.

Two of my men carry the cadet's body to a far corner and cover him with a sheet. I regret not being able to take him to the Country of Silence, on the lowest level of the Great Pyramid, as befits one our dead, but we have a more urgent mission at hand. We will have to come back for him after our moment of glory.

A rumble fills the air as the steel curtain rises from the floor. The odd collection of the Chamber of Artifacts disappears from view as half a meter of metal slides up the ends of the partition walls, then turns overhead, forming a roof. There is a sharp click and a shudder, and we are sealed from the rest of the Great Pyramid. We are alone with the Cannon and the Night Land.

I turn and contemplate my prize. Current Cannon have not been used for many years. They have awesome destructive power, focusing the Earth Current into a ray. The Earth Current is the bane of all the creatures of the Night Land, and cannons that use its power are the most effective weapon ever invented against them.

Foolish leaders banned them long ago, saying the weapons were wasteful of the Earth Current so necessary to our defense. But what good is the Earth Current if used only as fortification? What good is waiting for the Earth Current to wane and die? It is inevitable. Therefore, the Earth Current has already been wasted. It will not protect us forever. If it is no use to us a defense, then we must use it for attack, now, before we lose any more of its precious power.

I think back, to the time of the Darkening when we had other powerful weapons, the Incinerators, powered not by the Earth Current but by the waning rays of the Sun itself.

The Changed attacked Heliopolis without warning. They came in a mad rush from out of the cover of a nearby ridge. One moment, quiet, the next, the dim plain was alive with a sea of pustuled, glabrous creatures that screamed and gibbered as they sped towards the city. They carried clubs and other simple weapons, and some wore the ragged remnants of clothing, passed down by their unclean forefathers as a dim remembrance of the humanity they had lost by living out in that poisonous landscape. They swept up to the walls in a moment, but the guards were ready.

This was typical, and the recent years had been such that fully one quarter of the adult population manned the walls at any one time. In an instant, the guards switched on the Incinerators. Wide swaths were burned through their ranks, and the mutilated half-men screamed and wailed as the skin melted off their bones, or fell as burnt hollow husks, lucky enough to take the full blast and die instantly, their bodies cored through and cindered.

It was just another attack, we thought. One of so many. We could fight it off. We always had. But then we heard a far-off mournful howl, the baleful keen of an unearthly hound, and our hearts turned to water, and we wondered.

A red light pulses on the communication console. The Watch Deck is calling down to us. Word has gotten to the top of the command quickly, as if they have been expecting trouble. But the partition is sturdy. It is meant as a second line of defense if the Evil Powers breach the outer casing. Now it has become a bulwark, our protection from interference by those weak leaders who insist on placating the Night Land and suffering it to exist, as if by doing nothing and staying still the hungry eyes of the dark will turn their gaze elsewhere and we will be saved.

The Watchmen and cadets are finished, and look to me for their orders. At my signal one of them pulls a lever and the gears of the gun port groan into motion. An entire section of the outer wall lifts. I stand at the Cannon with my men and we watch as the Night Land comes into view. Our chamber's lights have died: we peer into blackness until our eyes adjust to the Night. There is little to see beyond the brilliant ring of the Earth Current but the shadowy expanse of the dead plain and the pale glimmering of distant fires. The resonating hum of machinery clangs to a stop and we stand, listening to the silence of the Land.

"There is no laughter," one of the Watchmen says.

"It is listening," I reply. "For once, it is listening."

I personally connect the main line into the power grid and the cannon hums to life. The Caretaker had done his task well. Pale green dials illumine range and target data, while an electric thrill crackles through the room from the sheer vibrant power that shrills within the blue steel housing.

The alarm lights again, another call from the Watch Deck. They are sure to have noticed the new connection to the Earth Current. It will only be a matter of time before they divine its meaning. I am not certain my eyes tricked me when, at the moment I flip the switch, the Earth Current dims a little, if only for half a heartbeat. But the warning from the Watch Deck goes ignored. We are steeled to our purpose, and through with listening to the weak platitudes of our so-called leaders.

The gate and walls of Uhrduk were holding. Our citizens heaved and sweated atop the bare stone wall, hurling down stones at all who approached. Some died, pierced by the spears and darts of the nomads, but many were those who replaced them. The nomad's battering ram lay untouched on the ground, covered with corpses. No figure swathed in animal skins lived long enough to ascend to the parapet. Their broken bodies lay in a heap at the base of the wall.

Then, bursting from the riverside quarter, came a frightened wailing, and those too young or old to be atop the walls fled into the central square. The nomads had slipped in, swimming up a channel and into a cistern that watered the city and provided it with drink. It was but a short swim underwater from the river and one would be inside the walls. Once found, it was an obvious weak spot in the defense, but no one had seen it until this day.

At the flick of a switch the Current Cannon comes to life, revived from its millennial sleep. With a grinding crunch of gears it levels its barrel to the horizon. A readout glows with data, assessing risk, calculating vectors. Without any effort by us, it has instantly sensed the closest and most immediate threats. There, in the middle distance, clustered behind a heap of stones, are the crouched and twisted forms of a score of abhumans. We had not seen them - could not see them in the fuligin shadows of the Night Land - but they glow clear and plain on the screen. We see them clearly as they look up, directly at the barracks. They seem to notice us, although we are at such a distance that that surely must be impossible. They gesture to one another, and as we watch, more gather to stare through the darkness at our open window.

The Turks bombarded Constantinople for many days, and soon there were many breaches in the walls. We fought them off a dozen times, but every day they would attack again. Their numbers were far greater than ours, and we could hope for no reinforcements. Then, on 28th of May, they made their final assault. As the sun set low on the horizon, the Turks charged the entire length of the wall at the same time. Their battle cries rose like the wail of vengeful ghosts as they assaulted the many breaches in our defense.

I was at one of them, a huge rent in the masonry where the Turks' infernal cannon had reduced the wall to rubble. It had been repaired with broken stones and barrels, but it was a thin line of protection. The Turks came on in a mad rush, and soon the last knights of Rome were fighting for their lives.

We were pushed back. The breach still held, but our men were being forced back. A Turk faced me, a swarthy man in a pointed helm, a scimitar gripped in his right hand. He sent a vicious swing at my face, but I parried him at the last moment. I cut and thrust back at him with my sword, but he bobbed and wove and I could not hit him. Then he fought back, a savage hail of blows landed on my sword and shield. A dozen times I came a hairsbreadth from death. But then I saw my chance. For a brief instant his guard was lowered, and I gave a mighty swing and cut deep into his chest.

"Mother of God!" I thought as I wrenched my blade free. "These Turks fight like demons. What chance do we have now?"

"A pity," I mused as he fell at my feet. "This man died for nothing. They will win regardless."

I saw more pointed helms swarm over the smoking mountain of rubble. I charged then, yelling out an oath to Our Savior, and plunged into their midst.

"The abhumans sense it. As if through some ancestral memory they have recognized this one weapon that can bring their destruction." It was one of the Watchmen who speaks, a brave man who has been with me for many years. His eyes gleam in the pale emerald glow of the screen, and in them I can see an emotion alien to the teeming metropolis of the Great Pyramid-hope. Here, before us, we have the means to fight back. Here, finally, we have a weapon.

I wonder how long the Earth Current will last once we begin to tap its force and send it hurtling across the plain. I am no fool. I know that the Council was telling the truth when they said the Cannon are wasteful of the Earth Current, but what choice have we? The Earth Current will die just as the Sun died thousands of years ago. Our only hope is that the Cannon can overwhelm all the creatures of the Outer Darkness before it runs out of energy. If it does not, we might still weaken them enough that we can send out our millions, armed and armored, and cut down the survivors with our Diskoi.

It is a desperate plan, but it is also our only plan. Humanity has little time. The Sun has guttered out. The world is cooling. The Earth Current will not sustain us for long. If humanity wants peace now is the time to fight for it, now, before this world finally dies. We do not have much time, a few centuries at most. Even I, who always Reawakens after death, do not have much time. This world will end, and I with it. I have lived more lives than any man, but when humanity dies out, I too will die.

Still the Changed assaulted Heliopolis, their diseased forms limping over the Darkening Plain as the sun bled high overhead. The people of Heliopolis worked the Incinerators in desperation, blasting smoking swaths through the onrushing crowd. The attackers carried crude ladders. They flung them against the steel palisade and scurried up. My soldiers were there to stop them, cutting off withered hands and smashing grotesque heads as they emerged over the wall.

For a while, it seemed, we held them back. They thronged in ever increasing numbers, but my men let not a single unclean creature set foot atop the wall. Then, over the struggling mass of humanity and its diseased cousins, came the lone high howl. As if it were a signal, the Changed slackened their assault. The howl broke through the air again, closer this time, and we spied a dark shape loping out of the distant shadows. It was a monstrous hound, as high as a house, with jet-black fur that made it look like a fragment of endless night as it sped across the plain.

The attackers parted to make room. As tall as our defenses were, the hound was nearly half the height of the wall, and in a single leap soared over us and landed in a broad lane inside.

My men gasped. A few were courageous and quick-thinking enough to shoot at the thing, but it barely seemed to notice. Without a pause, the hound ran away down the street.

Instantly I knew where it was headed, and choking with dread I summoned a unit of my men and sprinted after it. It was far ahead, but when it looked back and saw us pursuing it, it slackened a little, as if to taunt us.

It reached the Plaza of Rainbows, then turned to face us. We arrived, panting, a few moments later. We paused, unsure what to do. It made no move to run. Then it sat on its haunches, raised its snout towards the Master Lens far overhead, and let out a long, high-pitched howl.

We clamped our hands over our ears and wailed in pain. The arcane, bestial scream pierced our bodies. Many of my men fell to the ground, unconscious. In a panic I looked up to the lens. Thin cracks spread like spiders' webs across its surface. The howl continued, a perfect baleful pitch. Its sound encompassed everything, but in a moment it was joined by a slow, ominous cracking. I leapt into a doorway just as it shattered. Fragments of glass as wide as tables came crashing down. The men in the street were cut to pieces. I curled into a ball and hid as the glass burst on the flagstones and sent deadly flakes flying in all directions. My armor saved me, but wherever the smallest patch of skin showed through I was deeply lacerated.

It was all over in a moment, the din replaced with a still silence. I looked out of my hiding place. The street was covered in shards mixed with a bloody, unrecognizable pulp, all that remained of my men. In the center of the Plaza the hound surveyed the scene, unhurt. The glass directly above it had been pulverized by the full force of the howl. The beast's black fur was covered in a fine, scintillating dust. The hound shook itself, the glass powder tinkling softly as it settled on the marble flagstones. The Plaza, once a brilliant cascade of color, was stained a pale red in the light of the dying sun.

The hound looked directly at me. I scrambled to my feet and whipped out a pistol. It growled once, a low, mocking sound, then ran down a side street and was gone.

More abhumans are gathering, a vast mockery of humanity that fills the screen. They advance cautiously. Some walk on legs almost human, others undulate on foully pliable appendages, or scuttle like beetles on insectoid limbs. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the gun barrel lowers as it adjusts its range.

Far on the horizon, on the ridge overlooking the Giant's Kilns, a crowd of huge, monstrous men has gathered to stare at the Great Pyramid. In an instant they jump and shake their fists in a barbaric cheer, and lumber forward, their long strides rapidly overtaking the abhumans. They soon pass their twisted brethren, and storm towards the Earth Current.

We hear the Master of the Watch calling to us on the intercom. We ignore him. He is weak, afraid to take on the horrors of the Night Land, too timid to fight in his own self-defense. I check my aim and fire.

I led a group of Uhrduk's warriors into the riverside quarter. We were few. Most of us had to remain at the wall to hold it against the assailants who still tried to scale up. We charged down an alley and straight into an advancing group of nomads. Those in front charged us with sharpened sticks and heavy clubs. Others emerged from houses on both sides, dropping their loot and snatching up weapons.

My men began to fall. We fought hard, but we were outnumbered. I swung my greenstone axe in wide arcs, breaking through the crowd and calling on my men to regroup, but there were none left alive to hear. Then a stone glanced my shoulder. I tumbled against a wall and tried to regain my balance. A nomad, a huge brute swathed in reeking animal hide, swung the leg bone of a bull at me and caught me on the forehead. I fell. Three more nomads leapt on me, beating me down with sticks. I tried to gain my feet. The world spun. I saw houses burning, and nomads dragging our goods and women down the street. Then there was a sharp pain on the back of my neck, and blackness.

We cheer as the Current Cannon sends out a blinding beam of energy, splitting the eternal darkness of the Night Land with a pure light. It hoves into the advancing horde, cutting through them as if they were shadows. More take their place, but I aim and fire again, and another hundred of man's enemies are disintegrated by the tremendous power of the Earth Current.

I swivel the cannon and fire on a crowd of giants, cutting through the first dozen. They fall in a jumbled heap of dismembered bodies and limbs. I shout for the sheer joy of it, the thrill of my voice drowning out the pounding on the door and the crackle of the cannon. I fire again, and again, slicing giants in half and cutting broad swathes through the abhumans.

No more hiding! No more slow death as I watch the defenses of my beloved city fall! Now I am taking the battle to the enemy. Now I am on the attack. One of the Watchmen shouts out a warning and points to the Earth Current encircling the Great Pyramid. It is noticeably dimmer, and seems to fade with each pulse of the cannon. I laugh at the man's fear, and fire again. What need have we for the Earth Current, if not as a weapon? What use is it as a defense, when it could lead to victory? The Cannon hums and blazes, and I exult in the knowledge that we may, for once, emerge victorious. I thrill to think that in my next life I may, finally, Reawake in a time of peace.

The men of Constantinople rallied and surged into the Turkish ranks. We stayed them. For one brief, brittle moment we stayed them. But it was not to last, a conceit to think it would last. They renewed their attack. We had fought without break the entire day, and now moved as if lead weights were tied to our limbs. Our hearts faltered as we looked upon so many dead comrades lying there broken on the jagged stones. Our strikes slackened, our parries became more ill timed. A sword struck me, and my cuirass was cloven, and white heat burned deep in my shoulder, and I was on my knees. A struggle then, of many men around my person, while I swayed and the world became indistinct. Then a spear thrust, not too deep in my side, but enough, and I toppled backward. I did not feel my head hitting stone, and the battle raged onward topsy turvey for a time, growing dim at its edges, until a cold moment when all around were Turks, and one looked down upon me. But I was already dying.

Cheers echo through the room as I fire. The abhumans and giants are crowding just beyond the dimming barrier of the Earth Current. The beam of our cannon cuts through them. They gesture angrily, turning gnarled faces up at me, standing on heaps of their own dead. It is a slaughter. I am exultant. I keep firing. The cannon begins to glow with heat, the mechanism resonating with a high-pitched whine.

Then, as if a giant eye closed, everything goes dark. The Earth Current flickers and winks out. The cannon moans to silence. The Great Pyramid is plunged in darkness.

For a moment, silence, then the triumphant roar of the assembled creatures below. We hear the harsh rasp of their talons as they scrabble up the steep metal side of our home.

Our eyes are dazzled as the lights flare back on. The circle of Earth Current around the Great Pyramid bursts to life. For a brief second I see the hapless silhouettes of the creatures that were on its very surface when it relit. They are atomized in a moment. Most of the giants and abhumans fall back and rage helplessly, cut off from the Great Pyramid once again. But I see a full hundred have made it through and are now scaling the metal slope towards the gun port. It is nothing. Two sweeps of the Current Cannon and they will be gone.

I lower my aim, get a hulking giant in my sights, and push the firing mechanism. Nothing happens. The cannon is dead. My heart sinks and I know I have been betrayed. The cowards of the Council shut off the Earth Current for a moment, just long enough to disconnect the power coupling that leads to my cannon.

The cadets frantically work switches and wires, desperately trying to reconnect the Cannon, but I know it is useless. It has been shut off from the outside. The abhumans, led by the giant, are almost upon us. I draw my Diskos and order the others to do the same.

I staggered through the dim red roads of my once-brilliant city of Heliopolis. Everywhere lay the mangled remains of those who had been caught under the falling shards of the Master Lens. I approached the wall and saw innumerable creatures of the Darkening Plain swarming over them and into the streets. A tiny huddled group of survivors stumbled out of a building, and a mass of the Changed enveloped them, tearing them to pieces.

I pulled out my pistol and fired, burning a hole an inch wide through the chest of one of them. The others looked up, then rushed at me in a mass. I fired again and again, standing in the middle of the dim bland street where rainbows once danced. I waited for them, not trying to hide, not trying to run, but shooting down a score of the hateful creatures until they tackled me and I knew no more.

I assemble the cadets and Watchmen in a ragged line facing the open gun port. There is no time to close it. At my signal they draw their Diskoi. A dozen spinning blades spark and hum. We stand. For a moment, nothing, Then we hear the scratching of a hundred claws gaining purchase on the metal wall, and the grunts and snarls of inhuman throats.

They come through the gun port in a rush, and we step forward as one man and swing at them. Tainted blood splashes on the metal floor as their first rank go down, but more leap into the room and force us back.

I swing my weapon easily, decapitating the hunched creature in front of me and with a backhand blow cut off the arm of the beast beside it. I call on my men to rally, but slowly they inch back, outnumbered. Then a looming shadow blots out the opening, and a thick arm, muscles corded like steel cables, reaches inside and clutches one of my fellow Watchmen. The hand clenches. The man's armor creaks, then gives way. He is pulped like a vegetable.

The hand drops the broken bloody mass to the floor and sweeps in a wide arc back and forth. Men and abhumans alike are bowled over. I duck, then bring up my Diskos in time to cut off one of its fingers. The hand withdraws, and the giant pulls back away from the gun port, and a new crowd of abhumans rushes inside.

Our line is broken. Only a few men remain standing. The melee has descended into a chaotic mass of individual combats. I see my men pulled down by sheer numbers. A half dozen brutes surround me.

I thrust the spinning blade of my Diskos deep into one, its chest spouting blood, but another pounds on my armor with rocklike fists. I swing at it and it reels back, half its face cut away. Before I can regain my footing another picks me up in its burly arms and throws me to the floor.

I try to raise my Diskos, but one of the abhumans stomps on my chest. Winded, I am unable to resist as heavy hands pummel me. The scene fades, my eyesight dims, and the last I hear is the low, deep laughter coming over the hills from the east. . .

. . .and I Reawaken.