The Cry of the Night Hound

By John C Wright Part 2

22.

Later, I heard that he had walked his monsters to the gate, and thrust them forth. The Monstruwacans objected, demanding that the monsters be slain and studied, but Polynices was the son of the Castellan, and even the Watchmen feared his high rank; and so, against the ancient practices, on his authority alone, the gate was opened.

I never heard the complete tale. The Watchmen came to blows among themselves, those who respect the old laws were fewer than the young men who feared that Polynices would soon be Castellan, and hold untrammeled power over their lives.

Perhaps they were right to fear, though they feared the wrong man. Upon his ascension, Creon exiled all those who did Polynices any good turn to the worse levels of the plantations and mines beneath us; and he exiled those who stood for the law as well, not liking men man enough to defy the blood of Andros. All the witnesses of the gate-breaking were scattered and frightened beyond my efforts to find them.   

To open the gate without the procedures is the stuff of nightmares. It is how the Lesser Redoubt was destroyed. No one will speak of what happened.

I do know that Polynices walked unarmored across the Night Land soil, protected by nothing but his savage monsters. A million people watched him from the embrasures. He went not far: to the White Circle; and he came back without the Hounds.

But he had not been Prepared, and the Watch should have not permitted him to depart.

Had he been a man of common birth, they would have recalled their oaths, and stopped him. It was only a matter of a few minutes, a quarter hour at most, but when I heard the news, I knew that our age was as corrupt and degenerate as the Foretellers warn; and I secretly wondered, even I, when the Messenger of Time would be born to correct us.

Once inside again, Polynices surrendered to the Officer of the Watch, who bound him to the magistrate. The penalty was attainder: he was rendered sterile, unable even to adopt. The magistrate’s written opinion was circulated. His reasoning was that any child of Polynices would be honor-bound to esteem his ancestor’s name, and hence would defy, in his heart at first, but surely later openly, our strictest law and prohibition, the rule of quarantine. The idea that any son of Polynices, any child of the House of Andros, would be so callous as to disregard his father’s name and fame, of course, was not contemplated.  

Creon issued penalties more severe, including degradation of the family shield, and namelessness, and every humiliation our laws allow, but he suspended them upon Polynices’ sworn parole to live simply, without bringing further shame to family or phylum.

Polynices swore to have no further traffic with the Night Hounds, and no further dreams of a day when men domesticated hounds or rode the backs of monsters with the bodies of Centaurs and the heads of Gandharvas.

23.

I visited Polynices not long after Creon had been exulted to the post of Castellan by the unanimous accord of the Pyrtaneum, or at least, the accord of those not bound under house-arrest.  I recall how the Proctors, wearing halsberges and morions, stood at every cross-corridor and stair landing, blinking in the light, since the lanterns had only been restored that hour, after so many hours of dark.

A gaunt archivist named Triptolemus, who was no friend of Creon, invited me to walk with him. Triptolemus is lame, and leans upon a long white staff, and his eyes have grown dim over the years peering at twisted and uncertain shapes capering near smokeholes in the Night Lands. Around his neck he wears the silver chain of a Foreteller, for his dreams have been rated in the Acme or Elite grade by the Fate House.

He wore, for once, the dun long coat of the Monstruwacans. It is his right, for the Archivists are a collateral branch of that order, but I had never seen him dressed formally before. He had a squad of the Watch with him, which is also his right, for the Watch are vowed to protect the Monstruwacans as they travel to their tower. Triptolemus smiled and told me that his route to the tower, in this case, would be circuitous, and would happen to parallel my path.

These escorts were enormous in solid gray armor and dark unadorned helm, and in each gauntlet, trembling with unseen Earth-Current, was a huge Diskos weapon, whose terrible blade, when it spins, when it falls, cannot be parried. Their heated gray-black cloaks are like the darks wings of birds from some children’s book, and make them seem even more broad of shoulder than their shoulder-plates.

The corridors were empty of sound and motion. All others kept to their cabins.

The Proctors, who seemed slight as children compared to the Watchmen in their heavy armor, were polite enough when we came to the valves leading to my sister Ismene’s quarters. The Proctors kept their pikes in hand, and the blades were live, but they spoke softly, and they let us pass without challenge.

24.    

I found my brother in the Renunciation chamber, a wide space paneled in brown and gold of soothing hues, and barren, except for a wall screen luminous with a mandala of figures, standing before emotion-absorbing curtains of deep maroon. The mandala screen was rich with images from the elder days of the world: suns, moons, bearded stars, rivers of milk, birds, white clouds and other mythical and imaginary figures.

The meditation mat is supposed to recline on the floor, so the Penitent can lie prone, with the energy-centers of his nervous system aligned with the nodes of subtle Earth-Current woven into the mat-fibers. Polynices had the mat propped on the wall. It was folded and expanded slightly, so that the pattern of nodes looked like the hulking silhouette of an abhuman. The surface was streaked and scarred, as if long straight stokes of forceful blows had been delivered against the mat. I noticed these wounds were clustered around the shoulders, neck, chest and groin of the silhouette: killing blows, expertly delivered.

Here was Polynices, leaning languidly on the floor. He had torn the emotion-absorbing curtains down from their rings, and balled them up under his armpit to use as a pillow. In one hand a crystal cup for wine, which he drank neat, without water. A half-empty carafe was near his foot. He had taken the junction rod out from the mandala screen, so the images were dull both to eye and to spirit, and he held it lightly in one hand. I could see where his fingerprints had darkened it. He had been gripping it two-handed, as the haft of Diskos would be grasped by a man of the Watch; or by that rare hero who, of all his generation, survived a venture abroad in the Night Lands.

I said carefully, “So … You have not renounced?”

He made a noise of contempt in his nose, and flicked his finger against the rim of his wine cup. The cup was made of that type of crystal that can play simple songs when disturbed. This one was a child’s lullaby, filled with old and charming nonsense-words whose meaning even paleo-philologists cannot recall:

Springtime is green, little baby; Summer is gold; Autumn is gray, little baby, Winter is cold …

   He said, “Ismene says I must find some other task for my life, some work with which the Lectors will find no fault. She recommends I study in the local Infirmary, don the Robe, and become a Rasophore.”

I said, “She said the same to me: Ismene allowed me to see you only on the condition that I urge you to take up the burden of your life again.”

He flicked his finger against the cup.

Day follows Night, little baby; Night follows Day; Everything fine, little baby, passes away…

I said, “Father is dead. You should be the Castellan.”

“All say I slew him. My dogs.”

“You mean your Night Hounds.”

Flick. Everything foul, little baby, will fail in time too; Bright Day will come, little baby, when Dark Night is through…

“Did you?” I said.

He said, “Draego and Dracaina were startled by something. She threw herself between Father and Draego, trying to protect him. Creon and his men assumed ranks and brandished, but they did nothing. Nothing. So Creon did not precisely slaughter Father, but he … allowed … it to happen. I have never seen my dogs so enraged against each other. She was trying to rip out his throat. If they did not love me, they would not have stopped at my word. I have a special word I use to hold them in check. I call it my Master Word.” He made a throaty call, like a word without consonants: aeaeae!

I let that little blasphemy pass by in silence. I said: “Why didn’t you tell the magistrates what happened?”

“Creon’s magistrates?”

He flicked his finger against the cup again, harder this time, and the cup chimed as if it would break.

Hush and be still, little baby; Night Haunts will hear; Die we all will, little baby, when Night Haunts come near...   

Annoying. I was beginning to realize why our sister Ismene was so frayed and nervous these days.

He heaved a deep sigh. “I do not know what provoked Draego. I suspect one of Creon’s men stung him with a dagger point. And everything was going so well up until then! They were talking, Father and Creon, about letting me free from that room, restoring me in the eyes of the people; they spoke of how the hour-slips could be made to carry the tale as we wished it told. Like the old times.”

I said, “If not the magistrate, someone could be told of Creon’s treachery. The Pyrtaneum. The Orders. The Contemplatives. The Guilds. Surely I am not the only one suspicious that all the men were sent from the room save Creon’s partisans. Do you recall how I was arrested after you were saved from the Night Lands? Creon blamed the riot on me, and told father I stirred up the common people to bludgeon the Watch and break open the Gate for you. But I think Creon set his men to do the work, to bring the monsters in, telling them to claim my words inspired the deed. He breached the walls, not us, that father might die and we two be blamed. Creon is behind this all. He needed only get father alone in the room with your beasts!”

He grimaced. “An intricate theory; but it does not fit the facts.”

“It explains all!”

“Father, not Uncle Creon, sent everyone from the room. They wanted to talk to me about secret matters. Things lesser men would call treason. Creon said it was the only way to restore our family to honor, and to preserve our memory for later ages. The pnumaticists aver we are reborn again and again. Father does not wish, in his next incarnation some million years hence, to be reading historians who write nothing but denunciations of these times.”

He paused to laugh a bitter laugh.

Flick. When the Wheel turns, little baby, we cannot flee; the dagger for you, little baby, the capsule for me…

He said: “Have you ever thought how hopeless the Returns will be? All father’s critics will be reborn as well, you see, perhaps reborn as the very lecturers teaching him of the profanity and madness for which our period will be remembered. Thanks to me.”

“What profanity? What madness?”

“That is what Father called it. My plan. The thing we were discussing, which made father send the Watch away. He said that our family would be lost from fame and power if we did not support my plan, even though he hated it. I was going to go Out once more, and use Draego and Dracaina to capture a third Night Hound whelp; and then four and five and more. Enough to make a breeding stock. Enough to make, in one generation or two, a hound-pack equal to an army. They breed quickly. So quickly! Human life seems so weak and pale compared to what stalks the night!”

He flicked his finger: Hush and be still, little baby; no need for tears; Love binds us still, little baby, no matter the years…

“We were talking about what level of the pyramid, which abandoned city to use. We thought of Ventral Southwest Nine: you would only need to armor over four gateways to shut the place off. Father seemed to think the architects had detected life-essences, perhaps from some long-forgotten grain-store, still active scattered through the empty houses and barren parklands there, but Creon was sure the place was bare. Father hated my idea of breeding Hounds, you see; but public opinion left him no choice. Only if I turned out to be right, only if my dream of domestication of the monsters was proved true, would our bloodline be heroic, rather than accursed. Only if we had a hundred lads each with his own pack of Hounds, and if they slew a thousand giants. We could take back some of the outer buildings and towers, the Quiet City, the Dark Palace, or the Temple of the Masks.”

We were both silent for a moment, thinking each our gloomy thoughts.

He said, “Humans built them, you know. They were not always the haunt of abominations. I do not care what the Monstruwacans can prove with their science. My dreams say humans built them.”

We were silent another moment.

Eventually I said, “If you found some path leading to the Place of Refuge, surely this will revive our honor. You must have found something!”

“No one told you?”

“I am surrounded by courtiers. I am told only lies.”

“Some things they say are true.”

“They said you found nothing. It must be a lie.”

“Must it be?”

“What did you find?”

He said, “Ice. Ice and darkness.”

He moved his finger. The little cup sang: Nor Death nor Rebirth, my beloved; nor all the Night long, will keep us apart, little baby: for Love is so strong!

“Beyond the encampments of the abhumans, the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk climbs a long, slow slope of dark ice. Beneath the ice is hard igneous rock, showing that volcanoes flowed there perhaps a million years ago, perhaps more. There are no smoke-holes, no fire-pits, no light at all. Mile upon weary mile it goes. The air grows ever thinner and colder as the slope climbs. Even the strong men in my band where killed by that cold, so bitter was it, and our cloaks and our disciplines were no match for it. We walked for weeks, perhaps two months, breathing with our air-goblets held over our noses. There is nothing there. Not even the Night Hounds can tolerate it. Whenever we felt that pressure in our souls which told us a Silent One was approaching, we would throw us from the road into the snow to either side, and lay without motion until the dread and potent creature had passed by. Each time, one less man could find his feet again. Eventually we turned back.”

He wiped at his tears, grimacing. Then he said softly:

“Elagabalus, before he bit his capsule, said he saw a Dark Redoubt, as large as our own, but occupied all with Silent Ones rather than human life. At the end of the road, mile and miles ahead of us. But we were in darkness, utter darkness. He whispered to me that he had done something to his eyes to make them able to see despite the dark. Made them better, he said. I touched his face and put my finger in his empty eyesockets. That was when I noticed that two of our men, the ones pressed up against my shoulders to either side (for we huddled together for warmth) were no longer warm. Both had stopped breathing. I jumped back from them, and they were no longer in arm’s reach, and so I lost them. But I heard their footsteps continued forward in the darkness, on that road which leads to nothing. They marched and did not stop.

“I turned the rest of the men back, but in was not in time to save us.

“By the time we descended to warmer lands, and came within sight of the Great Redoubt in the far distance again, the abhumans had been warned, and were waiting.

“There were only nine of us left by the time we found a place to hide on the shore of a lake of salty poison. When those nine were dead, I used their bloated corpses as a raft, and the bodies were buoyant in that thick, mineral fluid. The abhumans on the shore could not follow. I built my hut of bricks of ice on a small atoll in the middle of that lake of poison.

“There I found my Hounds. They saved my life, you know. I could not have made it back through the leaguer of the abhumans, had they not scouted the terrain for me, killed the guards, slain the giants. And now they sit outside, crying for me. When I sleep, I hear them, you know. In my sleep.”

Flick. We shall live again, my beloved, for such is my song!

That was the last time I saw him alive.

25.    

Of course, I suppose I saw him alive several times after this, but seeing a magnified image of someone through the glass floor of the Viewing Chamber is not the same.

There were thousands of us gathered just from this level, and millions watching through similar Viewing Tables in all the cities of mankind on every inhabited deck. My seat was a privileged one, nearest the surface of the glass, and my neighbors were gathered row upon row in seats above and around me.

His escape was remarkable: he trod out into the gloom, head held high, making no attempt to hide or slink or crawl from rock to rock. The Dun Giants who are encamped so near our gates could be seen in the Viewing Table, hulking shadows against the shadows of broken rock, glaring in surprise at his boldness, and gesturing hugely with their arms to bring their brothers leaping quickly from rock to rock, gathering around him. How small he was next to them.

They gathered from the left and right, readying an ambuscade. The heaviest of the giants came loping out from the tall rocks to bar my brother’s path, and flourished high his truncheon, grinning with mirth. The man-creature’s tusks wet with drool, no doubt at the thought of feasting on man-flesh, and the piggish face was lit up with a strangely innocent glee, and the grisly mouth was wide and smiling.

Two huge woflike shapes came lumbering out of the gloom. Draego hamstrung the giant, and Dracaina tore out his throat as his fell, all in one swift and well-practiced move.  

When the next of the giants lunged, Draego’s monster teeth closed on an arm as thick as a tree-limb, but now it was Polynices who moved. His lit his weapon and swung the wheel-blade through the soft part of the giant’s neck with an expert stroke, the blade-lightning illuminating the night for just that moment. The coordination as they fought was as strange as the figures of a dance: each knew where the other would be. All three, Polynices, and his two horrific beasts, moved as one.   

They slew many giants, and many more ran away.

There was no feat of arms in living memory to equal this, not for three generations of man.

There was utter silence in the auditorium as we watched, thousands of us, and even the hawkers selling beer and smelling salts were voiceless with awe.

In the image in the Viewing Table, we saw the Night Hounds raise their red mussels toward the smoldering clouds of heaven. A moment later, through some high windows in the northeastern wall of the Pyramid, very dimly, we heard the cry of the Night Hounds, yowling their victory.

26.    

Over the next week, off and on, I watched my brother as he fared across the Night Lands with his two monsters. He had brought out from the Pyramid a pack of food-tablets, which he fed them.

The abhumans are the most like us of all the creatures of the Darkness, and, after being abroad seventy hours, Polynices came across a little hut of them, a bull, his mate and three sprats. The hut consisted of hides stretched across a framework of dried worm bones, placed like an upturned cup across the mouth of a smokehole, to gather in the heat and light. Polynices slew the creatures with his Diskos, and his Night Hounds ate their bodies. He lodged himself and his pets in their home.

Ismene says she saw him chewing flesh from the dead abhumans also, which is a sign that he had forgotten part of his human nature, and lost the Master Word. I saw him reach down and examine the bodies with his knife, but he could have been putting his hand to his mouth for any number of other reasons.

27.    

Polynices was often missing from the view table, as the operator of the lenses could find no clue of his hiding places, for the gray armor is meant to blend into the dark landscape. But when the Monstruwacans in their tower detected the discharge of Earth-Current, they would send the dial-numbers of their elevation and right track to the Viewers, who would train their arrangements of lenses on the area so identified, and sweep back and forth, seeking.

I was sleeping when the news came that the Slowly Turning Wheel had appeared out of the North, and the black mists parted around it as it advanced.

I ran from my chambers, still in my night-dress, down the many steps of the East-Northeast Stair to find the Viewing Table Chamber. Red light from the windows beat against the stairway as I ran, for the Night Land was stirring: the eerie whistle of the Sundering Worm, the deep strange voice of the Thing That Nods, and the roaring of brutes and the hooting of giants all rose in a nightmare clamor. The wild noise of hammers striking anvils issued from the underground holes to the south, as a sound of rage or celebration, and mocking laughter yammered from the smoke-filled valleys to the south-west.  

A shrill, fell cry sounded from one of the windowless mile-high Towers which rise to the West of the Last Redoubt, and my spirit trembled, for I could feel the disturbance in the aether which followed that cry. Through the windows, looking up, I beheld massive splashes of red light beat against those slightly tilted towers of black metal.   

Then I heard from all the windows, louder than any trumpet, the Home-Call, that great and mighty noise sent by the Monstruwacans to warn Polynices of a danger nigh to him. The sound was deafening. It overwhelmed the shrieks of the Night Land.

Beware; beware!

Again it sounded, and again.

Return, O thou Lost! Follow my Call and Return!

Slowly, the armored plates began to rise up across the windows, and the whisper of the Air-Clog began to make that deep hum which it only makes in time of grave danger. It meant that a Great Power, one of the Ulterior Beings, was abroad in the Night.

With a clang, the window armor fell across the scene, and the reddish light of eruption was shut out.

The Home-Call fell silent a minute or two before I reached the floor where the Viewing Table Chamber lay.

I ran down the corridors toward the Chamber, an endless time of running, silence all around me.

I am of the blood of Mirdath. I could feel the disturbance in the night as the prayers and hopes of the Millions in the Last Redoubt reached out across the Night Land toward some horrid danger facing Polynices. My legs moved as if in a slow dream, and I knew I had seen all this in a dream before; my eyes were blinded with salt tears, for I knew the ending of the dream.

I arrived at the doors leading to the Viewing Chamber when I felt the hope shatter and die in the air around me. Through the doors shut tight before me, I heard a great multitude of people all call out at once, a noise of breathless terror and woe.

Then, silence. I threw my shoulder to the door before the footman could open it for me.

My sister was already kneeing on the glass floor far below, weeping. Other women of my household had their veils across their faces.

And dimly, through the windows, I could hear the cry of the Night Hounds, lamenting their fallen master.

28.    

Ismene told me later he had been traveling north, nigh to the Hound of Silence, for there was a nest of Night Hounds there whose mother had been killed by a blood-drinker. He was seeking the whelps.

29.    

After my brother’s death, it became my habit to pay calls on Triptolemus the Foreteller. Under the austerity rules of his Order, he is not allowed to serve lavish entertainments, and so he was one of the few acquaintances from Father’s reign I could call upon without embarrassment to either of us. If a noble fed me according to my rank, this might be seen as a criticism of Creon, or showing support for the old regime: such slights are remembered when a man presents his son for elevation, or commendation to the Orders, or the Watch; under Creon’s rule, such slights were also remembered when magistrates convened in secret to draw up lists of infractions against the public discipline. Triptolemus was immune from such considerations.

He would often welcome me with a loaf and a carafe of heavily watered wine, but it was no better and no worse than what he fed himself.

We sat in his cabin which overlooks the Mad Library, where books whose thought-images are no longer sane are kept. Here were stacks of insulated cases, sandwiched between panels of meditative cork to mute the aether-noise. Whenever a scholar picked up one of the mad books with a pair of insulated tongs, the recorded voices would cry out, threatening or pleading, books begging to be read, promising forbidden knowledge.

It sounded so much like one of the Mountains in the Night Land, that I was amazed anyone could dwell in this chamber, much less come here to study. But much of the ancient learning is lost, and there is always scholar optimistic that a coherent account can be pieced together from the scattered jumble of ruined books.

He would shut the grate and block the noise and mind-noise while we spoke.

We talked of many light things, and some grave things. Once we spoke of Polynices.

I cannot name the watch or week when this was. Before, I was merely entertaining the notion of saving my brother; after this conversation, the purpose had hardened as if by alchemy into adamant.

It started with a question, which I uttered idly. The barrier of the Air-Clog  reaches all the way to the Electric Circle surrounding the base of the Great Redoubt to sheath its utmost tower. The aether-force from the Circle is alleged to repel all unclean spirits, and even the mightiest of the Nameless Ones is unable to cross it. How had Polynices gotten his Night Hounds across it, either going in or coming out?

Triptolemus frowned and did not speak for many a minute. I thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. But then he stirred and spoke.

“Like all secrets, the key is terrible and simple,” said Triptolemus, “Though the Master Monstruwacan would have forbidden your brother egress had he known your brother knew it. I can only assume your brother deduced during the long months while he was Out. Naturally, I can tell it to you, a woman.”

I said, perhaps a little stiffly, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the pool of candidates for proposed ventures would double. We have yet to discover what the creature is who comes to stand near the Great South Watcher, although his tracks are plain where he crosses the Road; the near side of the Deep Red Pit has never been glimpsed, despite that it is so close. Perhaps there is a city there, perhaps not; we cannot tell merely from the thickness and composition of the smoke which rises up, whether it is chimney-smoke from furnaces. A woman could skulk to the edge of the Pit and look down as easily as a man.”

He said, “If women were permitted to venture Out, the Pyramid would fall in a generation. They need only capture one, and breed from her a hybrid who can speak the Master Word, and our firmest defenses are negated at that one stroke.”

I said impatiently, “An old and wearisome excuse! Thousands or tens of thousands of women were captured surely when the Lesser Redoubt fell, a million years ago.”

“Perhaps their menfolk were mindful enough to slay them before they were Destroyed. In any case, an era when our population numbers dwindle is not an era where such talk as this is wise. Wives have duties more pressing than to make their children orphans.”

“It takes no great strength to fire an harquebus.”

He shook his head with sorrow. “Weapons that smite at a distance are an unwise innovation to our times! They should never have been reinvented. Such discharges draw with disproportionate swiftness the greater, older, and more cunning of the foes that slay us. It was your ancestor, Andros, whose bad example resurrected the ancient folly of tele-bellipotent weapons. The Monstruwacans sent discharges of Earth-Current rolling down the side of the Pyramid to slay his pursuers, killing many of them while they were yet afar off. After this, for years, men said, why not have a smaller instrument to do the same? Will it matter if the Older Powers are stirred up by their discharge, since they already bring their full force to bear against the Great Redoubt? So it was argued. Folly! There were many periods in history when the Redoubt was not pressed so close as this, when armed giants build encampments within half a mile off our doors and posterns. The Night Land has seethed with anger for a million years, and the choleric energy-levels are higher than other eras have known. They are certain to try some desperate, telling stroke against us, and we have stirred them up to it. It is only a matter of time before someone insists it is wise to take an harquebus outside, using it not for defense of our walls only.”

I thought it best not to mention, at that moment, my desire to equip myself with an harquebus and travel Out.

He shook his head, his dim eyes focused on nothing. With a thin hand he clutched the Foretelling chain around his neck, the symbol of his talent.

30.    

“Creon promises a return to the old ways, and the condemnation of such weapons. He is lying-I can sense such things, as can anyone who knows how to focus a Mind Glass-but I urged the masters of our order to acclaim for him nonetheless. Because the truth escapes his lips, whether he knows it or not. The old ways will return.

“Do you know how long we have been deviant from the ancient and established practices of our ancestors? Six hundred years, if our count from the time of the mutation riots in Courtstairwell, when the last Soul Glass was shattered; less than that, if you count from the time when the other cities adopted the New Regulations, and the multitudes cried out for a Castellan to govern us, rather than sages, using arms rather than words to chastise the scofflaw.

“Six hundred years is nothing. Some say the Pyramid is Six Million years old; some say Nine Million. Our way of life, our violence, our intrigues, our endless fear of race-degeneration, our licensing of marriages and undue pride in bloodline, and all restless yearning which drives a young women to impersonate the deeds of young men, and a young man to impersonate the deeds of Night Huntsman, all this is the trifle of a single second, an eyeblink, a sneeze, in an otherwise healthy and wholesome peoples.

“It will not be long before the fit will pass. I have seen it. Someone will come for our age, a Messenger of Time, even as Andros came in his age to tell the despairing peoples of the Last Redoubt that the myths of the sunlit elder world were true, and to describe the beasts and men of those times, and say the meaning of ancient words whose use had been forgotten. He was sent to put the heart in them, and to save the last of the Lesser Redoubt.

“I have seen it. Someone will come, either from the past or the future, and be born among us as a child, but will remember the mind-sciences we have forgotten, and banish madness and ambition from us once again. And in that time, we will follow the perfect ways each of us from love and duty, without any need for Castellans to tell us right and wrong. It will be soon, such a one shall be born, and he will cast for us a Soul Glass, for deep as well as surface thoughts, and teach us the art of its making.

“Creon’s falsehoods will be made the truth then, and all the forbidden weapons will be retuned to locked museums, and foolish gene tampering and breeding for the Night Hearing will be condemned. And young women will stop dreaming of how to be more manly than young men.”

31.    

“Breeding? Did you say, breeding for the Night Hearing?”

“The Eugenicist College does not seek merely to weed out the unfit. They think that talents such as mine are carried in the blood rather than in the spirit. For three hundred years, they have been forbidding or assenting to matches based only on such imaginary principles. Fools. As if two artists mating could produce a greater artist! It was this meddling by doctors in olden times which brought these genetic diseases upon us. It was not the Outer Beings.”

Since Triptolemus was the one, in times past, who told me that the Sun of ancient legend was no more than the name for a great search-light of immense power once used to illuminate the Land back when the Pyramid was newly raised, I am never sure how far to trust this tales of other times.  

In any case, I said, “Yet why this slight against all women? The monsters without us are so great, that mere strength cannot prevail against them; and the most dangerous are not made of matter at all, and cannot be smitten with an axe.”

“Young men must test themselves against the Darkness, if they are to retain their masculine nature; and also they can be expended without great loss. Women need not indulge in such extravagant gambles with suicide to maintain their mental health. Nor would I trust the sound-mindedness of menfolk who would expose their mothers, wives and daughters to such dangers: they would be soft men, men without honor, full of self-conceit.”

“Is what is sane for men someone insane for women? Surely justice requires the law treat all with equal dignity.”

He smiled at that. “Strange word for an aristocrat to say. If we were utterly sane, no one would venture Out, not ever. There is nothing more the Monstruwacans really need to know. The date of the failure of the Earth Current is calculated: the death of the human race is known, and dreamers of the far future have seen the Last Times. But we are human beings, and so we do mad things, and invent excuses to make ourselves believe that common sense compels us.”

I smiled sweetly at him, though his condescension irked me bitterly: “Since I am a woman, you can tell me the secret. How did Polynices get the Night Hounds across the Circle?”

He frowned when I spoke my brother’s name, but did not correct me. He had no love for Creon, after all.

“He invited them.”

“Is that all?”

“That is all, young Antigone. All this metal and energy, all these walls and weapons are merely the outer and material form of a spiritual battle, and they are the least important element in that battle. Once we say to the Outer Darkness: come in with me, I welcome you, then all this will not prevail to keep them out. So it is with all things, human or not, which try to eat our souls.”   

He advised me to cease my staring from the balconies so steadfastly at the body of my brother: he was sure it was perilous to health and sanity.

I thanked him for his counsel, but did not follow it, of course.

32.    

My months of waiting ended when, once, there came a filmy light flickering in the eyepiece of the spy-glass, and I put my eye to it.

The Man of Mist was standing on the edge of the little cup of salty soil where my brother lay. I could not tell where its feet were placed, so it might have been anywhere from twenty to forty feet tall. It seemed semi-solid, but a blue radiation shined from its wispy body, stronger at its trailing fingers and those strange streamers from its crown which looked so much like hair. There were three dark spots in its skull, which looked much like human eyes and mouth, if a mouth were wide indeed and hanging open jawlessly.

These entities are rare denizens of the outer miles of the Night Land. None had been seen so close to the Last Redoubt before, all previous sightings had been along the slopes of the glacier land north of the Quiet City; but this one made as if to approach my brother for a second time.  

The mist-man bent at the trunk and lowered its skull toward my brother. Its arms and fingers elongated oddly as it reached toward him.

Its shining hands cast a light across my brother’s right side. For a moment, the wheel of his weapon was plainly visible in the spy glass.

Connected to the main housing of the spyglass, a recording plate had been long prepared to receive an image: I hopped down from the stool to throw the little contact lever, and a minuscule trickle of the Earth-Current strengthened the light and the thought-energy gathered by the spy glass, to inscribe the scene onto the surface of the plate.

Haemon, who was watching through the repeater lens, said calmly: “Take a second plate: you will record a strangeness.”

I did as he said, sliding a second plate into the clamp, adjusting the charge, and closing the small brass lever that activated the works.

“What are you seeing?”

Instead of answering, he plucked me up by both elbows as if I were a child and held me before the eye-piece. My tip-toes trembled on the stool.

A dark monster, larger than one of my brother’s mythical dray-horses of the ancient world, came lumbering out of the shadows on the far side of the salt circle. By the light of the Man of Mist, by the tumbling flare of the smoke-hole, I saw the monster clearly, and saw the markings along its huge neck and massive, ugly jaws. It was a Night-Hound, of a breed striped gray and black, with a ruff of uncouth bristles running along its neck and shoulders. Ropes of saliva dripped from pale jaws, and the flesh of the monster was scaly and scabrous in some places, reptilian, but bristly and hairy in others.

The male hounds have a bigger ruff. This was a bitch, Dracaina.

She leapt into the middle part of the Man. I expected her to scatter it, but the Mist Man was solid enough to make her rebound from its chest. It stroked her with a gentle flutter of its long, thin fingers, and her foreleg on that side went out from under her, as if his lightest touch made her numb. As she fell, her teeth closed on the thin and semi-transparent arm. The black spot on its skull that represented its mouth now sagged alarmingly. With a slow, huge motion, the mist-man toppled back, dragged the half-paralyzed Night-Hound with it. The fume from the smoke hole suddenly spurted up, black and thick, and I lost any further clear sight of the fight. I saw a dim light grow brighter and dimmer, as if the two horrors were rolling down some unseen slope away from me, the opaque body of the Night-Hound now above and now below the strange Man of Mist.

My bother’s body had not been disturbed. When the trail of smoke from the hole began to blot out the scene, I saw that his blade of his disk was pale against the black sand, whereas before it had been dark.

I worked the small brass lever to inscribe a final plate before the image was lost to me.

33.    

My audience with the Master Monstruwacan was granted. The air in the Tower of Observation is rarefied, even for one who lives in the upper cities: the steward gave me a phial of aerial-water, in case I should grow faint, and also a breathing bell as small and dainty as a rose on a stem, to hold to my nose. A special garment and cap of dun color I must wear to enter the chamber, for the Forces and Powers of the Night Land direct many of their thoughts at the Observers whose watchfulness thwarts them. The fabric is insulated, and the dull hue is thought to make it difficult for the Southwest Watching Thing to count the number of men manning the instruments.

In the very center of the chamber, surrounded by curving armatures like an armillary sphere, was the Great Spy Glass, held some two hundred feet off the surface of the deck. Many ladders climbed up its immense sides, and along the service-catwalks and balconies clinging to it were little metal huts, pressurized and insulated, with bunks and mess for off-duty observers. The glass itself was ancient, a hundred yards across, and hung overhead like the full moon of the ancient world. Bus-bars and energy tubes the size of redwoods connected the base of the Great Spy Glass to the deck of the tower, and it was rumored that ancient architects had driven a straight shaft, which appears on no maps or diagrams, directly to the Earth Current crack far below, with dedicated lines leading here, so that, even should all other power fail, the Great Spy Glass would ever be watchful against our terrible foes.

In a circle all around the platform of the Spy Glass was the track and the engine to turn the machine clockwise and counterclockwise. The engine crew were sitting bundled on the dash, huddled near a samovar of steaming drink, looking up now and again at the signal lamps hanging from the small house near the eyepiece of the great glass.

The tower was open in all directions, the view broken only by great pillars to hold up the cupola. The outer surfaces of these pillars did not go to waste, for lesser spyglasses had been built in the hollow areas of their capitals, and lesser versions of those same famous machines that forever watch the foe and guard against surprise.

Microphones and ultraphones as long as the horns of behemoths leaned out from the crowded machicolations; and here were aetherometers in their delicate crystal shells, so sensitive to taint that only technicians vowed to celibacy and temperance could approach them. Magentometers and infravisuals peered from ledges in various directions. Long range thermometers registered the flux both from the body-heat of Great South Watching Thing and the Deliberately Moving Ice. Geometers and hypergeometers detected the trace changes to local disturbances in the plenum of time and space, their needles quaking whenever one of the Doors from the distant Country of Doors That Open made a void of nothingness in mid-darkness. Momosometers tracked the clamor from the Land of the Great Laughter; pneumographs traced the changes in the spirit-pressure; volcanometers registered the changes to underground electrothermal flows, perhaps a sign that the Ungainly Buried Thing was slowly clawing its way to the surface; thanatometers clicked to themselves, measuring the unseen radiations from the Blue Shining Place. The machines are made of black and dull gray metals, as if better to hide their purposes, and their lights and cylinders are dim and muted.

It was the quiet of the place that surprised me. I saw at least five hundred men at their stations. Many were Monstruwacans, but others were technicians and machine-tenders, fulgrators, spiritualists, psychometricians and other experts in the sciences. The Captain of the Watch was here, in full battle armor, with his tall disk-axe in his gauntlet, standing next to the speaking bells, in case messages must be sent at once to the Corps or the Gate. Fuglemen in gray and black stood by the switches and plungers which operated the machinery of the Home Call and the Set Speech, so that, by blasts of sound or floods of light-patterns, messages could be sent abroad to any adventurers. Yet of all these gathered here, and more who were resting between their duties in this place, every voice was hushed, every motion was quiet and controlled.

When I stepped from the readying chamber into the Tower of Observation itself, I could see why all talk was hushed in this place.

The five faces of the Great Watching Things that surround our mighty home could all be seen at once from this vantage. The left eye of the Southwest Watcher hung in the shadows of it ungainly silhouette, clearly visible; the proud and impassive gaze of the terrible Great South Watcher; the bell-like ear of the Crowned Watcher; the dark unlit shape of the Northwest Watching Thing, its head still nodded in surprise at the footstep of men from two generations ago; the tall form of the Southeast Watcher, dimly visible by the glare of those strange lights we call the Silver Torches. The Thing That Nods, for the last ten thousand years, had been crouched on a cold hillside not far from the Steaming Vent, and, when my father was young, volcanic action made slender gray-white lights appear in the depth of the Vent, and by that reflected glare, a light caught the edge of the cheek of the Thing That Nods, and the muscles of its muzzle were bunched so that it seemed to be smiling at the Last Redoubt.    

To my relief, I saw that my interview with the Master Monstruwacan was not to be held in this vast and silent chamber, watched by the huge and inhuman faces below us in the eternal gloom. With a polite bow, a clerk took me past where two aureneticists in earphones were noting the voice-pattern oscillations in the threats shouted out by the Lesser Upright Speaking Object. The clerk opened a hatch in what I thought was the energy-pile for a long-range thought-gathering instrument. But no, the chamber within was mostly empty space, and the gathering mechanism was dull, all its dials blank. Here the Monstruwacan had set up a presence chamber far more spartan and austere than my uncle’s opulent reception hall: merely a few chairs of insulated metal next to a large glass table. There was a thought-scribing box with caps on extending arms held above the table, for scribes to make notes of what they viewed. No images were projected on the table at the moment, or perhaps it was focused on a part of the Night Land illumined by no smoke holes.

I am afraid my manners, bad as they are, were even worse then, for I was disoriented. My first words were: “That voice! It said my name as I walked by. I wanted to hear-surely such a terrible thing will not come to pass! It was about to say… what was it about to say? Buried alive?”

The Master Monstruwacan was a solidly-built man, whose face was so harsh it could have been chipped from an iron block. His hair was cropped so close to his skull, that its iron-gray hue was lost against his flesh tone, which was darker than normal, as if a life of exposure to strange radiations had leeched the color from his flesh. His eyes were the color of a Diskos-weapon, dull and iron-gray.

“That was the nearer and higher-pitched of the two identified sources from the Mountain of the Voice That Speaks. I am sorry you were exposed. You should have a mnemonicist remove the memory when you leave here: otherwise it will give you nightmares. You have studied the dream-defensive arts? Or are noble-born girls excused from that practice these days?”

The condescension in his voice sobered me. I straightened up, and opened my mouth to make some haughty reply, but, as good fortune would have it, his manners were no better than my own, so he interrupted me before I could speak, nodding to a nearby chair, and saying: “Sit! I have little time for this business, but I am required to hear your request for an appeal.”

“You sound like you’ve made up your mind, Master Monstruwacan.”

“Long ago, Castellan’s daughter; but I am giving you these few minutes to change it, if you can.”

“You know the tale of Andros and Mirdath, how she experienced anabiosis when he exposed her body-only apparently dead-to an afflatus from the Earth-Current….”

 He held up his broad, thick hand. “I know many tales. You seek to persuade me? I am a man of the night science. Speak to me of facts first, and then give interpretation, theory and persuasive urging after.”

I passed him the plates I had taken from the spyglass.

“Here is an image from nine months ago; here one from nine days ago. This is my brother’s Diskos where it lies on the black sand near his body. Note the chip in the blade of the weapon: in the first image it is near the base of the forks, perhaps at seven-o’clock. In the second image it is near the apex of the weapon, at twelve-o’clock. Such is the fact. The interpretation is as clear. Nothing but the life-energy of the wielder can make the Diskos spin. Here it is turning, albeit slowly. The conclusion is that my brother is alive.”

He pushed the plates back toward me. “Not so. The conclusion is merely that some residual of the life-force is draining slowly from the cells of his dead body. The fingernails and hair of a corpse grow after the body dies: this is known to science. Perhaps we are merely seeing such a residuum here. The long-range biometers have been trained on him many periods over the last nine months, and have detected not even the smallest trace of life.”

“Nine months, with no trace of decay….”

“The smokes and fumes of the Night Land some times betray strange preservative properties, and we know of invisible radiations that slay the animalcules which cause natural corruption.”

“But I also have reading here showing warmth still in the body…”

“Perhaps this is heat from the nearby volcanic smokehole.”

“Spectrochemical analysis shows the oxygen to carbon dioxide content changes in the air near that hole. It is consistent with a long period of shallow breathing.”

“It is also consistent with what might be expected near a fire source.”

“We do not know for certain that he is not alive, comatose, but…”

“We know for certain no man should risk his life to bring back another who has fallen in the Night Land! We know from records both ancient and recent that the monsters sometimes allow a corpse to linger unmolested in plain sight, in hopes of luring some child of man forth from our mighty home.”

“Sir! Each bit of evidence alone admits of some second explanation, but the weight of them together indicates a vital force may yet be present. But if there is any chance my brother is merely in a swoon, or clenched by a time-distortion…”   

He slapped the surface of the glass table with his palm, a shockingly loud noise in that quiet, enclosed place.

“My judgment was overruled, first, when I advised against your brother venturing forth to seek the Country of Refuge beyond the Place of the Abhumans, which is no more than a silly tale for children; second, when he brought a brace of monsters into the Pyramid, something clean against our most ancient laws, a violation of our quarantines, an abomination. I demanded that your brother bite his Capsule, as was my right to ask. Both times your father overrode me. The irony of that cannot be lost on you. Why is your father dead, mistress? Whose negligence murdered him? Now the Adamantine Key has passed into the hands of a man devoted to restoring civility and propriety to our government, not the unsteady whims of a blind man. No. Let your brother be robbed of name and fame and all. Let his corpse sit in the view of the northern windows for an eternity, a warning to the generations yet to be. I will not be overruled this time.”

There was more argument, of course.

The Monstruwacan did not know he was arguing in favor of my venturing Out.