Authors: John C. Wright

Awake in the Night Land (45 page)

BOOK: Awake in the Night Land

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I killed two more before they were upon me. The Diskos jumped back into my hands; I swung the mighty weapon and tore a swine-creature in half. Lightning sizzled from the blade, jarring and shocking swine-men touching the one I bisected. Bloodstains were on the ceiling above me: I swung the pole-arm left and right, chopping off limbs and heads….

I was knocked from my feet. A swine-man broke his dagger against the stubborn armor of my chest; but the stink of his breath was in my nostrils; I could see the tiny hairs of his bristles around his white eyes, the fluid down the twin tubes of his ugly nose, the foam on his tusks….

The door behind me shivered in its frame. A crack of light appeared, running from the top of the doorframe to the threshold. A low, thin, piercing cry (which I heard even above the roar of my disk-weapon, above the hideous pig-squealing of the abhumans) echoed from the distant Watchers. They had waited an eternity. They had waited for an entire universe to grow old and die. They had waited for this moment.

Two of the swine-men wrestled the Diskos from my grasp. The weapon shocked them, and they fell, theirs paws burnt and bloody from where they had touched the haft. The memories of Ydmos stirred in my memory: and I wondered from where the charge of Earth-Current the weapon was using had come.

Something else from Ydmos stirred in my memory as well. His people knew the art of resisting mental domination. It had not worked perfectly, and the enemy could find ways around it, as it had with him, for the enemy had found a way to drive him mad, and have him kill his own loved ones.

But, he still knew enough to know how false memories could be implanted.

I remembered the Irish Elk. I remembered what the great and magnificent beasts had looked like, rushing along the grassy plains which, at that time, stretched across all Europe, including the peninsula that one day, half-submerged, would be the British Isles.

How had I not seen it before? He-Sings-Death was a caveman, from some fourteen thousand years before Christ. Enoch was a Biblical antediluvian. The ages of the Biblical patriarchs, when added up, did not reach back farther than 4000 or 5000 years at most: less than half the time. Kitimil was a Neanderthal Man. His race dated from two hundred thousand years before Christ. The Neanderthal came from a world that the Nephilim, the sons of Caine, could not come from.

These outer beings were not fallen angels. They were not the devils from the mother’s Bible lore, any more than they were the Dry Folk of The Smotherer that He-Sings-Death took them to be.

It was a lie. The memories in my head of Enoch, son of Caine were an invention. I had never made a bargain with the Dark Powers. I had never bowed down to them.

My soul was not entangled with them. I rotated the thousand-sided figure in my mind, and, at once, the false memories of Enoch were gone. Whatever happened now, they could not follow me through my own soul. The worm had wiggled off the hook.

Even with half a dozen of the squealing, stinking, pig-things on me, I reached out my hand. Ydmos did not know how the Diskos was magnetically attuned to the soul of the user. The science, by his time, had been forgotten. But Abraxander-the-Threshold knew it. A slight push in my imagination on the thousand-sided figure, and the mighty weapon popped into and out of the fourth dimension and it was in my hand again.

Ydmos did not know how the spiritual energies in the weapon were programmed. He did not even know what the weapon was made of. But the Blue Man knew. I knew. The slightest touch on the thousand-sided figure brought the blue assemblers into my bloodstream, my skin, my nervous system. I had no need for the two systems to “handshake”, since the Diskos was already attuned to me. As quickly as that, and I had a mental link with the spirit in the weapon; and I knew the programming codes.

The safety interlock disengaged. Ydmos had not even known there was a safety interlock. I programmed the weapon to do what it was that the arrows of Mneseus had done, but with tremendously more force than a spark rubbed from Amber could summon. Then, mentally, I ordered the power core to overload.

White fire shined from the weapon, and flashes of terrible lightning shot in each direction. My armor grounded me, but not the swine-things touching me. The electricity flowed to them and to their comrades touching them. The whole huddle of the creatures was paralyzed as their limbs jerked with torture-spasms. I stood, and threw the whole lot of them from me. The one or two not already dead, I decapitated with a backhand stroke of the mighty weapon. Sparks and black smoke poured from the piled corpses around me.

He-Sings-Death had not known why the after-life creatures, the monster he had thought was the King of the Dead had allowed him to see the ghost of his wife in a dream, but Ydmos understood the aetheric energies involved in connecting the living and the dead. Mneseus understood necromancy. He-Sings-Death thought that the horror he had met, had begged, and had sung his sad songs to, had been moved by his plea to allow his wife to live again. All a deception. All a lie. The death-being had been using that sorrow, that plea, and those tears to make a connection similar to the connections I was using to call weapons into my hands from across the barrier of time and space. He-Sings-Death had been allowed to go down into the underworld and return, not to bring his wife to life again, but to let the horrors who fed off the souls of the dead follow him back up to the light again. That was why he had been told not to turn his head; so that he would not see what was following him. Poor fool.

He had opened the door for them. But who could close it again, once opened?

The swine-things were slain or thrown back, but, at that same moment, like a mist rising from the ground, I saw dozens of pale and terrible spirits, hooded and shrouded in gray, and silent as death itself, standing before me. I heard the door hinges creak behind me, and the door swung open.

I backed up, and took my position in the threshold. She was behind me, as I knew she would be. Kitimil, I did not see him; I hope he scuttled inside during the confusion. Even him, I would not leave out there, in the airless red plain of silence, with them.

The silent, robed figures raised their left hands, all in unison. The open doors turned into green jade, and the stones of the porch and threshold melded or bonded with them in a strange fashion I did not comprehend.

The door now could not be shut.

All the silent, huge and misshapen outer gods rose to their feet, sending the mountains tumbling.

150. The Master Of The Master-Word

One of the hooded figures glanced at me, and my heart burned with cold in my chest, so painfully that I would have dropped my weapon, if my weapon were not, of its own accord, holding itself in my hand. I would have knelt and fainted, had not the soft hands behind me, woman’s hands, held onto my gray cloak. I leaned heavily on the shaft of my weapon, and she prevented me from falling.

I said, “Why didn’t you leave me out here?”

From behind me, I felt her warm breath tickling my ear. “Don’t be silly. Say the word.”

She was using the language of Ydmos’ time. It was the Inner Speech, the tongue he had never thought to hear again.

And the declension used in that strange language was not the mode used when a grave danger threatened. It was the mode used only during decontamination procedures. Her voice was rich with unspoken laughter. At the very moment of the utter and absolute victory of darkness, she was amused at them, as if they were harmless: a mere afterthought, a fading nightmare, which the new universe would soon forget.

The word she meant, of course, was the Master-Word.

I said, “What? The Master-Word won’t drive them away. It has no power over them. It is merely something they cannot say.”

She said, “A dog hair cannot bite someone, but you called Pepper from outside of time. You called Africa to you, and me. Why not more? There is One who is out there, who can do more than Pepper can.”

“What One? Who?”

“The One who promises that all lovers will be reunited after the end.”

I said the Master-Word. She was right. I could sense or see links, like the same chain that bound my soul to hers, running from the Master-Word to some ulterior power beyond all space and time.

With the slightest rotation of the thousand-sided solid, I brought the being, whatever it was, that had first spoken that word into being, and invited Him to enter this scene, this universe, and my life.

The light was too bright to look at, but, once I got used to it, I saw her, and I turned, and I embraced her, despite the hardness of my armor. The door closed behind me.

It was so bright.