by tais teng
They crossed a field of flowers that glowed a
sickly green in the dark. Through the center a
brook ran. It even murmured.
"Don't drink the water here," Lurella warned.
"It is sulfuric acid, welling up straight from the
deeps. It would burn your lips right off your
face."
Three hours later they reached the road. It
seemed to stretch forever, dull slabs of what
looked like dusty ice. In their depths webs of
cold light flickered.
"Our roads were meant to last forever," Lurella
said. "Programmed diamond, laced with palladium.
Self-repairing, but but the last three million
year they keep forgetting." She sounded a bit
chagrined.
Only a mile down the road two night-hounds
jumped from the shrubs, skidded across the road
and bounded in their direction. Five more
followed.
"Ah," Lurella said, "there comes dinner!"
She raised her hands and a wave of absolute
silence spread across the road, froze the
night-hounds in the middle of their run. They
probably screamed but the stillness held, became
horrible, as if time itself had stopped and Marat
was drowning in dust.
She put her hands down and sound returned. This
was the first time that Marat was happy to hear
insane laughter rolling across the hills or the
lamentations of the Country of Wailing.
"We don't eat meat," Dunja protested. "Eating
somebody's flesh is almost as bad as eating their
souls."
"You'll learn to like it," Lurella told her.
"You left all your way-food standing on the other
side of the Air Clog."
When Marat's watch told him the hour of sleep
was long past they halted and started a fire of
dried lichen and the dung of night-hounds. Lurella
hung a will-o'-the-wisp in the air and took a
flute from her pouch. A tune drifted across the
rolling hills, telling of golden cities far and
the mighty sun, glorious as a ruby in the slowly
darkling sky.
Dunja had fallen asleep the moment her head
touched the self-inflating pillow.
Marat sat staring in the blue en green flames,
almost hypnotized, when Lurella touched his
shoulder and offered him an apple. "This is the
Pomegranate of Long Life. It stops you aging,
kills all known viruses."
The pomegranate was an improbable red in the
glow of Lurella's wisp, with a waxy skin. It did
look artificial and quite poisonous.
"Eat it. I don't want you growing old, with all
your teeth falling out before I have properly
enjoyed you."
"You have one for Dunja, too?"
"I found its tree growing in the hull of a
crashed star-ship. It bore a single fruit and died
when I plucked it." She put the apple in his hand.
"Lets make a deal. You rule the Lesser Redoubt for
fifty years, with her as your consort. Then you
are mine." She closed his fingers on the apple.
"Come on. Don't you trust me? "
"Of course I don't trust you. But there are
easier ways to kill."
He bit into the fruit. The juice ran down his
chin and the taste was tart, with the pips hot as
pepper when he crunched them between his teeth. He
wiped his lips. "I am immortal now? I don't feel
any different."
"Not immortal. You won't age but any night-hound
could still kill you."
He touched his diskos. "Just let them try!" And
then he realized he felt different after all,
stronger, fearless. I am a hero now. A hero
can be killed, will probably killed in quite a
horrible way, but old age will never claim me.
He looked down at his sleeping lover. Fifty
years I'll be yours, Dunja, true as any husband
can be. I won't kiss at any other woman's lips,
even when your face is all wrinkles and you keep
forgetting my name.
"Fifty years," his true love repeated, "and then
you are mine."
When she turned away to gaze down the road, he
spat a tiny pip in the palm of his hand. Always
keep your options open and all heroes were
tricksters anyhow. At least the ones that
survived.
Traveling the Night Land with a Power was most
instructive. Once a pair of giants paralleled
their road but decided not to attack. When they
turned Lurella raised her hands and pulled the
smaller one back in an invisible net of silence.
For hours the giant stood at the edge of the road,
quivering, his eyes turning dull while the
mistress of the House fed. He finally sank to his
knees and crumpled.
"You drank his soul," Dunja said. Her voice was
filled with horror. "You destroyed him. Took so
much he won't ever be reborn."
"I was made as a weapon, gene-tailored by the
Road Makers to fight the pneumavores." Lurella
shrugged. "But you know how it goes. Fight an
unbeatable enemy for centuries and you become just
like them. I still hunt darklings, but a girl has
to eat, too."
"I see. You are just like the mansonyaggers. A
living weapon gone feral."
"How harsh," she smiled.
"But you are much more beautiful than a
mansonyagger." Dunja sighed. "I wouldn't bother me
so much if you looked like an old witch."
There are many kinds of love and even more kinds
of lust. When Marat returned from an erl-mouse
hunt he found the two girls entwined and grunting.
He didn't for a moment believe they were fighting.
He stepped back in the darkness and made sure he
made some pebbles rattle when he returned half an
hour later.
Things you don't talk about seldom become a
problem, he had concluded when he was about five,
and that still held true.
Marat, age 21
Seventy five miles to the House of Silence
doesn't seem all that great a distance, especially
with a wide road leading straight to it. But this
was the Night Land and even with an ally as
powerful as Lurella they had to make many detours.
Also, time and space seemed different here.
Sometimes they passed the same shrub after
trudging for three days, with the remains of a
fire they had left still smoking. A fire moreover
that Marat was quite sure he had stamped out.
"Tomorrow," Lurella said six weeks later,
"tomorrow we'll reach the House of Silence. Then
it is only a few months to the Lesser Redoubt."
She leaned against a boulder, gazing up into the
dark sky. Marat sat down next to her.
"What are you looking at?" To him the sky seemed
completely featureless, a smooth velvet dark.
"The sun. She has gone out but I can still see
her against the background of living galaxies. She
has shrunken since my time, no larger than a
balled fist when she once filled half the sky."
The next morning the road turned to the left and
they saw the House of Silence standing on its
razor-edged hill.
"All your windows are dark," Marat said.
"I am not there," Lurella said. "No reason to
lure prey."
Steps led down to a sunken entrance. There was
an iron portcullis with a twilit garden in the
distance. Stone faces bordered the gate. Every
time Marat looked away they changed but all seemed
in agony, their teeth bared or lips opened in a
soundless scream. Well, no victim can complain
he wasn't warned in advance, Marat thought.
It had felt safe on the road, knowing that nothing
worse roamed the darkness than walked right beside
you.
"I have to take some precautions." Just in front
of the entrance Lurella drew a chalk circle around
them, hung a will of wisp above them. "Stay inside
the circle if you prize your life and soul. I have
to revert to my basic shape to replenish my
powers. It is quite brainless, all reflexes. I
would destroy you instantly if I found you in one
of the rooms."
"We'll sit down quietly," Dunja assured her.
The moment Lurella stepped inside, all lights
came on. Almost instantly the rustling started.
Lizard-mice ran inside, a wave of coral-snakes and
winged toads came next. A giant stepped past,
turned an imploring gaze on them. His maned lion
face was a mask of pure panic. Three Silent Ones
followed.
"She is a monster," Dunja stated.
"She is our monster. We have been hunting, too."
"What we eat, we don't destroy. Anything with a
soul will be reborn." She nodded. "We are just
lending their bodies, but Lurella devours their
very soul."
When Lurella returned she was glorious. It was
as if she walked in an invisible bundle of
sunlight. Each step seemed to lift her from the
ground.
"I am ready to go now," she said. Behind her all
candles were snuffed out, leaving the House once
more dark and still.
The road seemed almost like home after all those
days of trudging across its diamond slabs.
"There is something I don't completely
understand," Dunja said. She had promoted herself
to official navigator and unrolled Lurella's
master-map. With every passing mile it had grown
more detailed and kept correcting itself. "Only
three months to the Lesser Redoubt you just said.
Now, according to this map, which you insist is
accurate, we haven't covered even a tenth of the
distance."
"More like a hundredth. I was running low when
Marat finally deigned to show up. You need a lot
of power to wake a hibernating mansonyagger."
"A mansonyagger?" Dunja cried. "You must be
crazy!"
"They make good steeds. And about being crazy,
yes, that helps when you want to ride a
mansonyagger."
They walked for half a mile before Lurella
stepped from the road and followed an almost
invisible trail. It was in fact more like the
opposite of a trail: Here the moss grew markedly
higher, with their green glass flowers almost as
big as fists. These flowers were filled to the
brim with the sweet liquor that normally attracted
night-hounds from a hundred miles around.
This is a path all living creatures avoid,
Marat understood, a direction no-one will
take.
"He is still there," Lurella said when they
topped a hill. "I wasn't quite sure. It has been
such a long time. At least half a million years."
They looked down on a clearing in the moss. A
mound of land coral rose from a field of shiny
pebbles. Trophy-racks surrounded the field like an
amphitheater, row after stepped row. Thousands of
wrinkled masks hung on the pegs and clattered in
the warm breeze.
Marat raised his night-glasses. No, not masks at
all. They must be flayed faces, dipped in
formaldehyde and then petrified by the sulfur
breeze. All of the tanned faces were human, Marat
saw, but mostly of races long since discontinued
by the Eugenicists.
"He hunts humans," Lurella said. "That is what
his original name means. Menschenjäger,
hunter of men. He kills other creatures but only
true humans are worth collecting. After a hunt a
mansonyagger had to show his commander the flayed
faces of his victims. The lowest mansonyaggers
were called “hundred-face-heroes”, their marshals
“million-lords”." She knelt at he edge of the
field, took one of the shiny pebbles. "The
crystallized eye of a victim. Another way of
keeping count."
The eye seemed still fresh, with the blood
vessels tiny red trees against the eye-white.
Lurella held it next to Dunja's face. "The iris is
the same green, my dear. Perhaps an ancestor?"
Dunja snatched the eye from Lurella's hand,
threw it over her shoulder in the moss. "No
ancestor of mine. I'm standing right here. He
never ate my great-grandmother."
"You are quite right. You must be the improved
model."
Lurella reached in the air and a control panel
appeared, all glowing lines and cursive
machine-script. She touched three pulsing nodes,
spoke a sentence that was mostly hisses and dry
clicks, then typed it again on the floating
keyboard.
"Keep your diskoi ready. The Command of
Restraint sometimes changes spontaneously." She
waited until their weapons announced their
readiness with a shower of violet sparks, then hit
the hooked Enter symbol.
The mound shivered, burst open. Eight legs
flailed around, straightened. The mansonyagger was
constructed from almost indestructible adamant,
steel-blue with cinnabar veins. Three heads rose
on flexible necks, turned in their direction. The
heads were featureless: no trace of eyes, no nose
or mouth. Marat could guess the reason and it gave
him a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
This must be a machine from the Age of Martyrs,
made to terrorize, not a clean killing machine at
all.
"I can kill you," the mansonyagger stated. His
voice was a pleasant baritone.
"You can try," Lurella agreed.
It must have been the right answer because all
three heads nodded. "You are a Road Maker. Road
Makers are almost as pure as the Root Race. It
would be a honor to serve you, commander. There
are some conditions, though."
"State them."
"It will take me three months to convey you to
the Lesser Redoubt. At the end of two months I'll
kill the other woman and take her face, even if
she isn't really a true human but of an
indeterminate race. When we arrive you'll fight me
and I will take your face."
"Hey!" Dunja cried. "You are talking about me.
You can't..."
Lurella put a finger to her lips, smiled. Marat
felt a pulse of pure night-thought pass between
the the two girls. It was intense and two-way. He
didn't catch a single word, of course.
"I agree," Lurella said.
"Yes, it is all right," Dunja said.
"You may call me Wolf. The freeze-dried brain of
a wolf-spider forms my control-node. The
wolf-spider was the most savage hunter of the
sun-lit times." He extruded three leather seats,
sank down on his belly so they could mount him.
Ay, to ride a mansonyagger with your arms
wrapped around the slender waist of a real Road
Maker girl! Dunja sat in the front-seat, her map
unrolled on her lap, shouting directions. It
didn't seem to matter that there was only a single
road and a straight one at that: Dunja was the
Official Navigator.
Even Yalib al-Murad would envy me now. No
less than two beautiful wives and the Lesser
Redoubt hosts at least a hundred cities, each
more splendid than Yalib's fabled Baghdad.
The land was now rushing past too fast to gather
kindling or to hunt. Below them the diamond slabs
became a blur.
A mountain chain heaved itself up from beyond
the horizon. Even from the Tower that had been at
the limits of vision. Beyond lay mythic lands,
with all Redoubt maps mere hearsay and conjecture.
The mountaintops opened up in a valley and a
twilit slope seemed to reach all the way to the
sky. The ruins of what must have been a city of
billions were outlined by dancing ulfire. The
light died down and slipped to the edges of his
vision the moment Marat tried to focus his
night-glasses.
"Those lights are Earth remembering," Lurella
declared. "Mother Gaea weeping for the cities she
once wore as a shining mantle." It sounded like a
quote and probably was.
"End of the Road," the Wolf announced and came
to a screeching halt. The last diamond slab lay
broken on the bottom of a crater. The raised rims
were made of cracked black glass. "A sky-hammer
strike. It must have got the diamond-weaver that
was laying the road." He gingerly touched the
glass with a feathered feeler, jumped back.
"Still radioactive?" Lurella asked.
"Not a good place to camp. Especially for
organic creatures. Which I am at least partly."
They halted in the shelter of dozen fallen
columns.
"Anybody for erl-mouse soup?" Marat called.
It was almost a ritual by now, with everybody
doing his or hers assigned task. Marat put a grain
of powdered water in their cooking-pot and the
container instantly filled with liquid condensed
from the air.
Lurella tapped the crystal beneath the pot and
the diamond started to glow, became red hot. Dunja
had meanwhile been chopping the tough
bitter-roots.
After their dinner they mounted again. Wolf
remolded their seats and turned them into
feather-soft beds.
That night sleep eluded Marat for a long time.
Up-slope the dead metropolis burned and he heard
plaintive voices, snatches of songs. Both of the
girls slept soundly, Dunja with her diskos across
her belly and her map safely pushed between her
breasts. One of Lurella's eyes remained open and
scanned the surroundings, even while asleep. Road
Makers dozed like hares, with only one part of
their brain resting and the other half ready for
instant action.
Wolf raised one of his heads, looked back.
"They must love you deeply, consenting to give
their lives for you."
"Dunja, you mean?"
"And the other one. She is a Road Maker plus,
upgraded. Still, no human has ever defeated me."
"There is first time for everything."
"That is one of the things that keeps me going.
The hope that some day I'll find a worthy enemy.
One powerful or cunning enough to give me a hero's
death." There was a pause. "My designers made me
blind and deaf, you know, without the sense of
taste."
"Yes?" This is so crazy, he thought. What am I
doing here, listening to the complaints of a
mansonyagger who is going to kill my lovers?
"When I take a face, Rabath, I can wear it like
my own. Connect it to my own nervous system and
look through human eyes, smell the night. Taste
salty blood and bitter ash. I can be human until
it starts to rot."
"Human isn't all it is rumored to be. Now let me
sleep."
When Marat woke the fourth morning they had
crossed the slope. In the distance a dark forest
was laid out, with an ocean to the right. The
ocean was dotted with calderas. The water must be
quite hot, boiling even, because it shone with
ulfire.
"We called it the Gulf of Ramora," Lurella said.
"When a girl went courting she raced her lovers on
a wind-kite made of black glass." She closed her
eyes and Marat wondered if she saw her own nuptial
race. She, the most beautiful girl of her city,
with a dozen lovers in pursuit. "There were star
beasts from Arcturus and great white whales to
hunt. After a hunt we drank their steaming blood."
The Road Makers had been gentle philosophers,
according to Marat's teacher. If Lurella was in
any way typical that had been a huge
misunderstanding.
The trees of the forest closed in on the
speeding mansonyagger, so he had to zigzag, jump
across tangled roots. The trees were like living
mountains, their tops so high they seemed to touch
the very center of the sky. Voiceless birds
fluttered past, with gauze-lined maws to filter
plankton from the air.
Lurella threw her own net of silence and hauled
in a dozen for the cooking-pot.
"There should be a crashed ship somewhere,"
Lurella said while she shook her net and dropped
the dead birds on the road.
"A star-ship?" Marat asked.
"No, from much more recent. Just something with
wings. We had lost the secret of space-travel by
then."
"I see it," Dunja said. "On the map I mean." She
spread her fingers to zoom in. "It looks like a
crushed butterfly."
"They were sentient and quite fierce. Good at
chess, too."
But when the road crossed the place they found
only tree-covered hills, with a sprinkling of jale
flowers.
Lurella frowned.
"The last time... Wait, those flowers must be
metallovores. They love all rare earths and
ultra-heavy metals." She clacked her tongue.
"Somebody should exterminate them. That ship was a
goddamn monument."
"Will there be anything dangerous, later?" Dunja
asked. "The map mentions monster slugs, humpbacked
men and bird-creatures."
"They are dangerous enough, but for me they are
just ingredients for our cooking-pot."
"Wings might be nice to collect," Wolf mused.
"And I have never seen the world through the eyes
of a bird."
Dunja folded the map. "So we just lean back and
enjoy the show."
"I was only speaking for myself. Keep your
diskoi ready. I can't be everywhere at once."
They didn't see any humpbacked men, but the
monster slugs attacked just in time. They were
down to their last dried erl-mouse.
Mountains again and the map put a blue spark at
the foothills. The spark grew a dotted line all
the way to the dried sea where the Lesser Redoubt
rose.
"A tunnel," Lurella said. "Go down that gorge,
Wolf."
A half circle of vitrified bones and broken
skulls surrounded the dark entrance. None of the
skulls was even slightly human. All showed the
telltale burn-marks of a saker. It was the kind of
light-gun Marat only knew from Road maker tales.
"Speak the master-word," a voice whispered right
into Marat's brain. "Speak the master-word or turn
back." One of the ten meter high statues that
flanked the entrance lifted his saker. The single
lens was the size of a giant land-squids eye.
"Your turn," Lurella said to Dunja. "This body,
it isn't exactly human."
"The word," the guardian repeated and pointed
his weapon at Lurella. The beam of a saker could
be focused. Sharpshooters were able to sever the
leg of a cockroach at ninety paces.
She can get her rival killed. Dunja has only
to hesitate a few seconds more. Marat cried
the master-word at exactly the same second Dunja
spoke it.
"The word is right." The statue became stone
again.
"A moment before we go inside?" Wolf said. "I
have been counting. Keeping score. This the first
day of the third month. The human girl is mine."
One of his arms instantly grew a flaying knife.
"I think you made a mistake," Lurella said. "The
number of days of a month..."
Marat reached for his diskos but he knew it
would be too late. That pesky delay before it
reached full power. And a diskos against an
adamant Mansonyagger? Who was he kidding?
"No mistake!" The mansonyagger sounded
aggrieved. "No mistake at all. I was even
generous. I used a thirty-one day standard-month."
"Still... Let me have a look at your timer." A
swift gesture and Wolf's control panel hung in the
air. "Give me the timer."
"62 days 0 hour 3 minutes 34 seconds" appeared
in urgent violet.
Lurella's left hand stabbed a control node and
the whole panel turned red. "Reset to zero," she
cried and the panel glowed a soothing mint green
once again.
The mansonyagger staggered, looked at the
gleaming knife and retracted it.
"I seem to... What was I saying?"
Lurella banished the control panel with a wave
off her hand. "Nothing important." She nodded to
the entrance of the tunnel. "Shall we enter?"
The mansonyagger galloped through a seemingly
endless tunnel. The Road Makers had painted the
ceiling with long extinguished constellations.
Lurella pointed them out: "That cross we called
the Double Ax. Around the yellow star to the left
a dozen living worlds orbited, with blue seas and
purple continents. Of course, we wanted them. So
we fought a beautiful war with the Sal Hadre.
Almost three thousand years of valor and brave and
horrible deeds. Until a new enemy appeared who
attacked us both."
"The Eaters?"
"The Eaters didn't come from anywhere
extraterrestrial. That was just a self-serving lie
later generations told themselves. The Eaters,
that was us."
"But..."
"The sun was the first star to die." She smiled.
"A bit of a coincidence, eh? No, look at the Night
Land. At all the evil, the monsters. Only there
are no unholy monsters, there is no evil from
beyond the stars. Only us humans."
It took them a week to cross the tunnel. There
was no glowing exit, of course, no steadily
growing circle of daylight. The stars just
vanished and they ran under the black sky of the
Night Land again.
This was the most desolate of deserts, an
ancient sea bed with a thick crust of salt.
Fumaroles spewed poison gas and half way lay the
ten mile long wreck of what had once been the
sea-going palace of Chairman-emperor Carnacki. The
Lesser Redoubt painted a black silhouette against
a haze of fire.
Living there the sky would always be burning,
Marat thought. It wasn't exactly daylight but no
night either. I am Rabath, the Rabath and I will
be king there.
"No trace of Watchers here," Dunja remarked.
"It just isn't worth their while," Lurella said.
"There are twelve million humans inside at most."
Ten miles from the pyramid Marat saw the first
darkling staring at the single light on the very
top of the pyramid. Staring enviously, he thought.
It hates us for the light and warmth that is
inside.
The darkling had the body of a giant but the
head was wrong, far too small for intelligence and
it perched on a long snakelike neck. Marat noticed
a second monster, then a dozen.
A whole army of monsters encircled the Redoubt.
An infinitely patient army, waiting for the earth
current to fail and the gates to crumble.
"This is as far as I go," Lurella said. "Their
current cannons are quite powerful and set to fire
even beyond the Air Clog."
"You want us to ride the mansonyagger ten miles
through an army of monsters?" Dunja asked. "Why
did you take us this whole way? You could have
killed us right in front of the Redoubt."
"Army of monsters?" Lurella raised her hand.
"What army of monsters?" and from her fingertips
spiraled a stillness, an unsound so deafening that
time itself stopped.
The whole army went down like a million stalks
of corn in a screaming hurricane. Went down and
didn't rise again.
"Don't look back," Lurella warned. "I am burning
too bright. Looking me into the eye you would go
insane."
"You arrived!" The mansonyagger crowed. "I
brought you here. Now you must fight me, lady
Lurella."
"I will kill you," the mistress of the House of
Silence warned him. "Just a touch would shatter
your adamant, burn even your glass fiber nerves."
"A hero's death. Such is my fondest wish. Fight
me."
"She drank them all, smashed Wolf like he was
made of eggshell," Dunja whispered while they
walked through the rows of slumped monsters. Her
voice was hoarse with horror. "She is so powerful,
she could have sucked the Redoubt dry. The Air
Clog wouldn't have stopped her for a second."
"I would never do such a stupid thing,"
Lurella's voice ran in their head, a voice like
the tolling of bronze bells as huge as mountains.
"I am a farmer of men, not a rabid wolf."
"You fed well," Marat said.
"Better than I ever did, my true love. It was
such a great wedding present you gave me."
The pyramid drew closer and Marat could hear the
sound of sirens. Lights ran up and down the sides
of the Redoubt.
"They seem to have noticed us," Dunja said.
They stepped through the Air Clog and were
confronted by an platoon of mansonyaggers, guild
masters and Censors. Cannons turned in their
direction, with the earth current dancing around
their muzzles.
"Peace," Marat raised both hands. "I am Rabath.
Rabath reborn and I come to rule you." He nodded
to the killing field, the dead monsters. "This is
proof enough, I hope?"
A Censor gaunt as a scarecrow was the first to
touch his right ear and bow. "I greet our high
lord, Rabath reborn." He laid his diskos at
Marat's feet.
Dunja hooked her arm in Marat"s. "And I am his
queen Dunja."
© tais teng
11 Nov 2011
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