The Hidden Lamp

by Brett Davidson

The Masquers had not failed to notice Meyr's behaviour. Although it was normal for an unaffiliated girl of the Dead Cities to be open in her liaisons and experimentation was a necessary part of maturation, it was still necessary for them to advise and censure her.

"We feel the emanations of your mind when you entwine yourself with your lovers," Londe told her. "You want what you should not want and achieve a state that you should not achieve."

Meyr laughed and bragged, to no effect.

"There is a presence that you call but you cannot let it in," Londe elaborated. "In the Eye of the Winds there is a knot-"

The Eye! They had told her of this thing, confirming every tale she had heard and told, but they never took her to see it – and probably never would. It was quite clear, she thought, that she was only ever to be a ward of the Masquers and no more than that. She wanted more, and if it did not come from this order, then she would take what she wanted elsewhere. "It desires me!" Meyr retorted, as if this was justification enough. To her, it was.

Londe shook her head. "It desires us all, too much."

"Then let it have me instead of you. My life is only my own – so the Census has made perfectly clear."

"It will have you, and it will not stop with you."

"I will not stop!"

"We know… and we suggest therefore that you learn and practise your craft under our advisement."

Meyr snorted. "I will not be your official hetaera. If that is what I am, then I will be my own!"

"It is dangerous," Londe said quietly. The elder interlaced her fingers and sighed to indicate weariness, but Meyr could see the tension in the gesture and knew then that she was indeed on a vital trail.

"According to the Creed of Heroes, all of life is a danger," Meyr snapped and left her.
 

Increasingly estranged from the Masquer order, Meyr found herself being forced or allowing herself to be forced farther from the centre of her adopted city, until she was living almost exclusively at the fringes of the populated halls. She made her nest in a suite of decommissioned gunnery quarters that abutted the outer wall of the Pyramid itself, a place where few others dared to venture for fear that these might be the weakest seams of the Redoubt's defences. This did not concern her – or perhaps it attracted her.

Meyr found a few old libraries and looted them, hoping half-heartedly to find a lexicon that might enable her to understand Face, but whatever language he spoke was probably protohistoric – belonging to an age before the construction of the Redoubt – and was not described in any volume she could find. Some of the books which she deemed redundant and did not keep for herself would be useful trade items at least, which was no small consideration when she had to support herself.

On her forays she would even break into sighting and rangefinding installations, where on a whim she tended a spyglass and returned it to some semblance of working order. It took weeks of work to override the various safeguards and power up its active systems until the majority of its telltales were fresh green, but as that assignment progressed, like all the assignments that she set for herself, once started, she would see it through to whatever end and effect it entailed.

One diphaos she put her forehead to a curved brace, grasped the direction wheels and peered through the eyecups. This gave her the first direct view she had ever had of the Land itself.

Ah yes, now that was it! She grinned. It was no great thing, this place, and there were scores of thousands like it about the outer shell of the Pyramid, but it was her own and solely her own Secret Eye.

At the back of her mind, she heard the insinuating whispers of the long-silent guns that had been directed by this instrument. Their simple eidongnostic systems knew nothing of the passage of time, reciting their names and status and addressing her as a Watch Master who had no doubt been dead for an aeon. "Where, where?" they asked. "I am The Shout too Swift to Hear, I am Chastisement, I am The Sieve of Fire, I am Defiance, I am the Regretful Framer of Limits!" She ignored them.

Carefully, drinking in every detail of what she saw, she began to scan. Through the reticulated lenses she scanned a vista of grey dunes and tangled moor, split here and there with fissures glowing in far ulfire while odd flickerings of jale appeared and disappeared seemingly at random. At the base of her view she saw the arc of the protective Electric Circle and heaped against that line like a tidemark, the banked ashen remains of the uncounted generations of creatures that had attempted to breach it. Above, the sky was perfectly black and smooth in its emptiness; there was no moon, no single star. Somewhere there hung the invisible corpse of the sun, consumed, it was said, by the Eaters of the All Stars. To one side, East, she saw a cluster of pale, motionless lights. This was the Quiet City, she guessed. It was built on the shores of the Giants' Sea and near her line of sight she could see the deep red-ulfire glow of their kilns.

Such power she had in seeing. She remembered her fancies wearing the old Watchman's helmet in the market and smiled to herself. The Monstruwacans in their high tower saw this vista every diphaos and sent their carefully edited views down to the view tables and galleries of the lower cities. Saving the seers of those Highest Equals, Meyr alone saw this unfiltered view, and better than those seers, she set her own schedule. She laughed and directed the external lenses about almost at random until she saw the Watcher.

The thing was hunched before a pale dome that made a gloomy chiaroscuro of its features, enabling her to perceive some detail despite the overall darkness of the Land. It seemed to have no distinct edge as such, but rose in stages from the dune field. In the outermost zone of what might be called its dominion, it appeared to be pelted with a sort of rippling black coat, perhaps some sort of forest, and…

Perhaps like the body of an immense swimmer, it pushed its way through the earth and left a wake of stone furling slowly about it, as slowly as the glass had flowed in the lost room of her childhood…

She squinted, trying to see more clearly, but with little success. It was not merely the peculiar twisting and reddening of light that the thing caused in its vicinity that frustrated her, but the irreducible strangeness of the thing. What she was seeing was merely what her mind could make of what her eyes had never seen before. The Watcher might be like a mountain, because it was vast, and it might be patterned in the folds of its foothills with something like a labyrinth, but as soon as she thought she grasped the shape, she would blink and it would be simply an incomprehensible pattern of darkness and deeper darkness…

Without being aware of the gesture, she turned the control gimbals of the spyglass and found herself gazing at the central mass of the beast. There seemed to there something corresponding to a head, something with a face. Two glittering orbs of darkness stared out of that face and in to her own.

The spyglass was old and it had not been updated to compensate for the growing powers of the Watchers, so when Meyr looked into the face of the monster, it looked back with almost the full, unmediated force of its sentience. The vision drove itself into her like an iron spike and she screamed. She felt as if the plates of her skull were opening and her soul was being unpacked like a silken cloak drawn from a box. Her memories were spread out in an elaborate and static embroidery: she saw red beads lighting a path along a dark corridor, she remembered a great hall filled with a moist wind that sang, she remembered Nurse telling her tales by dim night light. She remembered the play, the murdered Sun, the adversaries that were rag-and-stick imitations of this real beast…

Diffused in a welter of imagery, her thoughts stalled in spectacle and she thought that she might die… and yet, it seemed like an obscure consummation. Face appeared before her, his halo brighter than it had ever been, his song ringing like a great bell and the sole physical sensation remaining to her was a note of ecstasy that was of precisely the same chord. Slowly and inevitably she faded into the vibration and then knew nothing.

When she came to herself again, she was lying on her back with a pounding migraine headache. Hours or diphae might have passed; her eyes were crusted and her mouth tasted foul and her undergarments were soaked with her urine. She had no illusions about how close a call she must have had. The spyglass would have been built to respond instantly to the intrusion of nonhuman qualia, and when the head brace had detected aberrant brainwave patterns, it had activated a mechanical shutdown and saved her life. Because she had tampered with the system, it had almost been too slow, and this was painfully apparent to her: every jale telltale light sent synaesthetic echoes of pain through her body. She groaned and held her head. There were odd thoughts winding themselves like spider webs in her mind and incomprehensible whisperings sounded in her ears. She looked up and Face stared back at her from the ceiling, his expression unreadable.

She lay there for a while, trying to gather her wits while the voices and colours subsided. Face crooned a lullaby. An attempt to rise brought on another attack and she doubled over, vomiting. There was blood in the mucus and bile, as if something had been done to her insides. It smelt of copper. Blood is iron, yet it smells of copper, she thought, giggling, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The world lurched and she steadied herself against the wall with her hand and made it to an erect posture. She was dizzy, but the worst of the fit seemed to have passed and she was able at last to collect herself. Presently she left the stinking chamber and staggered home, humming Face's song to keep herself steady.

Recuperating in her nest, Meyr thought about the implications of her experience and her survival. The Great Watcher of the South had nearly killed her simply by being seen. Now she knew why the Watchmen wore filtered helmets and why only trained seers gazed upon it from their high tower. This awareness chastened her, but only for a moment and presently she grinned. She, Meyr, had seen the Watcher and she had not died! Laughter bubbled up like a spring from her lips.

Bathing one morning, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and saw the mark the Watcher had left on her. No longer black, her eyes were now bleached pale: one was albino-red and the other, somehow less affected, retained enough pigment to appear blue, though the pupil seemed permanently dilated. She turned away. Her first purchase that diphaos was of a dye that would restore her appearance. She might have cared to appear exotic, but she had barely escaped the Eugenicists as a child and she was not going to take another chance amongst all of her other dangers.