by tais teng
Marat, age 22
Marat was the High Lord, the king of the Lesser
Redoubt, but a quarter of a million years had
passed since Rabath's last known incarnation. In
the meantime there had been a thousand dynasties,
revolutions, emperors and usurpers. Several
powerful families considered the Lesser Redoubt
their personal property.
The first murder attempt came on the second day,
even before the official inauguration.
"There is dead man with a still smoking
fire-lance lying in front of our sleeping room,"
Dunja informed him.
Marat turned the man over on his back. It took no
effort: the assassin was a shriveled husk, sucked
dry of more than his lifeblood.
"She is still protecting you," Dunja said.
"Us. I saw you two kissing."
"Well..."
"It doesn't matter. She has good taste. We can
both agree on that."
He called the Censors, pointed to the dead man.
"Do you know who this is? His shoes are
hand-stitched. Much too fine for a commoner.
Anyhow, a fire-lance is a dueling weapon for the
upper class."
"This is the nephew of lord Desmund of the Nine
Jade Flutes," their commander said after a slight
hesitation. "The family owns sixteen upper cities
and two Deep Gardens."
"No longer. Throw all who bear that name from the
topmost balcony."
"That his nephew... I mean that doesn't prove
that lord Desmund himself..."
Marat turned to another Censor: "Kill him."
"Certainly, lord." His diskos jabbed upward,
severed the arm with the half-raised weapon from
his commander.
"You can follow orders," Marat said. "That is
good, commander. No, make that general or whatever
you call a head of the king's personal army. Now
about lord Desmund..."
"I'll take care of it, your highness."
"Your highness", that was even better. "King" was
a very obscure title from the dawn of man. The
Censor had done his homework.
There were four more attempts, two thousand
executions, and then the families of the Great got
the message: King Rabath was there to stay.
Below the Lesser Redoubt the Deep Gardens
stretched. There were almost as many fields as
cities. Some were fields with raspberries as big
as your fist, other lakes with star-ship chlorella
or misty jungles. Their biologists had counted
every gene and could cross a weasel with a tomato.
Marat called the guild-master of the most
productive field to his secure room. Nine Censors
flanked him. Nine more stood hidden behind
curtains of chameleon-silk.
He opened his hand: "This is the most precious
object in the whole Redoubt."
"A seed, Your Highness?"
"A seed from the Pomegranate of Immortality.
Star-ship pilots used it to complete their
thousand year long journeys. Can you
unravel its code? Grow me a new tree?"
"We are no Road Makers, lord, no demigods. But we
can try."
"See that you succeed. I personally knew a Road
Maker and she wasn't able to grow a new tree."
"I... understand."
"If you succeed I'll make you the Viscount of,
eh, All Deep Gardens. And you will be rich and
powerful beyond all dreams of avarice. If you
fail..." There are sentences a certain kind of
ruler doesn't have to finish.
The guild-master returned three month later and
handed him a pomegranate. The color seemed
slightly less red but that could be the light.
"It wasn't that hard, Your Highness. It produces
viruses that invade every cell and make an optimal
copy of the nucleus. Every time a cell mutates,
the backup rectifies it. It is impossible to get
sick or to grow old."
"You tried it?"
"I injected it in a rat and put her in an
accelerated time field. After the equivalent of
nine centuries the rat was still alive."
"You told nobody, as I ordered?"
"Of course, your Highness." All color fled from
his face and his lips turned gray. The most
logical thing Marat could do now was kill him to
keep the secret.
Marat turned to his head-Censor.
"This man is now the Viscount of All Gardens." He
smiled. "And forever too, I guess."
Never waste a competent man, he thought. They are
so very hard to find. And murdering everybody who
crossed him would set a pattern, made him
predictable. No, better toss in some random acts
of generosity to muddy the waters.
He went to his queen, put the pomegranate in her
hand.
"This is the Pomegranate of..."
"Yes, of immortality. I know. You think I would
go to sleep while you and that floozy..."
"Ah, clever girl."
She took a bite from the fruit. "Well, it is good
to know that you trust me. That I am truly your
queen."
"I made a promise," he warned her. "I have a
appointment to keep."
"Half a century is a long time. And at the end
I'll still be young." The juice of eternal life
ran down her chin. He took her in his arms and
kissed her forehead so she could keep on eating.
He loved her, he truly loved her and would have
gladly spent eternity with her. That day.
Marat, age 42
He never thought of himself as "Marat" anymore.
He was king Rabath even in his own mind.
The pneumavores and darklings had been gathering
lately. Every day the circle beyond the Air Clog
grew, expanded.
He tried dreaming of the House of Silence but
even when it appeared all windows remained dark.
Signaling by more mundane means like lasers was
impossible. The line of sight was blocked by no
less than two mountain chains even if his
engineers used the flat earth conversion.
He called the Master of Guns up to the
Observatory which he had taken as his residence.
It was an old man he saw, almost hairless and
hands that kept shacking. The human genome had
been optimized for a standard life of exactly
eighty-three years. Up to that age a man remained
strong and vigorous and then suddenly declined and
died in the course of two months.
"You located the ancient blueprints and repaired
the cannons yourself?" Rabath asked. "That is
true?"
"True."
"I need more. A thousand guns at least. The
darklings gather. They'll storm the Redoubt before
the year is over."
"By then I'll be dead and my ashes scattered
across the Deep Gardens. And no, lord, I can't
build even a single new cannon. I need niobium,
three kinds of rare earth, webs of doped
were-glass. There is none to be found in the whole
Redoubt. We used all of the rest to erect the Air
Clog."
"Outside? In the Night Land?"
"Consult the Master of Geographers. He'll have
maps of the prehistoric mines, perhaps even a
satellite survey."
A week later the Master of Guns was dead, but
there were others who could read the blueprints,
and they had the repaired guns as examples.
The first sortie failed and almost ten thousand
soldiers were killed, their souls eaten. It was
clearly impossible to breach the encirclement.
"Kites," Dunja said. "Remember the Festival of
the Failed Birds in Grand Montmartre? Those boys
flew for hours and almost none of the soul-eaters
have wings."
"You are a genius!"
The wings were transparent and even against the
curtain of fire almost invisible. Another ten
thousand men, most of them boys to cut the weight,
swarmed from the Tower of Observation. The beacon
on top of the tower flared, a dazzling jale that
blinded any being gazing in that direction.
Almost a hundred returned.
It was enough.
Three months later the guns fired. Pale lines
swept across the army of the night.
Rabath stood in front of an observation window,
his arm around his lady. The blades of a half a
thousand scythes, he thought, and I am the Grim
Reaper. See them go down. He no longer believed he
was a man. One so powerful must surely be a
demigod at least.
That night he dreamed of the House of Silence and
all windows were lit. It must have been an
ordinary dream, though, because nobody answered
when he cried Lurella's name.
He awoke with a start. Dunja lays next to him,
her eyes wide open, her mouth a thin line of
disapproval. "Do you already call for her? It has
been only twenty years. You have still thirty
years to go."
"It was just a dream."
Marat, age 47
"You are sure?" Rabath asked.
"Very sure, Your highness," his Supreme Commander
said. Lemuil was the second most powerful man in
the Lesser Redoubt but he was utterly without
ambition. Some are born to follow and Rabath was
the most perfect master he could want.
"Do you have any idea why?"
"Well, she thinks you are a monster. A
night-hound in human shape. Sorry, that were her
own words. And the other conspirators agree. The
assassination is set for three days from now."
"The queen might have a point. You have to go
back thirty thousand years before you find a
leader that killed half as many people."
"But the fields in front of the Redoubt are empty
for the first time in history, lord. Our patrols
roam all the way to the Great Sea. We mine
tellurium and niobium in the Land of Humpbacked
Men. Fortresses guard the Upward Gorge."
"Kill her. Mercy is a luxury no warlord can
afford. Don't use poison. She is immune to all
poison."
"I'll keep that in mind, your Highness."
"We are at war you know. Still at war with the
whole Night Land."
They hadn't slept together for three years. Still
his bed felt particularly empty that night.
Marat, age 56
The crusade against the Dark faltered, then
turned into a rout. The guardian fortresses lay in
ruin, with the whole Upward Slope lost. The Night
Land could breed monsters faster than humans could
make babies. A single night-hound threw litters of
nineteen and that every year.
Nobody knew how the Silent Ones reproduced, but
no matter how many Rabath's armies killed, the
next time a lot more walked down the roads.
Deep inside the world something shifted. Perhaps
a stream of liquid nickle-iron changed direction
in the core or the magnetic field lost its
polarity. The earth current faltered, then shut
down completely.
Rabath wasn't in Redoubt when the Air Clog
failed. He was driving down the road in a car
armored with scales of condensed glass when the
cry for help came.
"There are Silent Ones everywhere!" came the cry
of his Supreme Commander. "They tunneled down to
the bedrock. Came up from the Deep Gardens and..."
Rabath raised his hand.
"Stop the car. I want to go outside."
He stepped on the newly laid road and the diamond
felt very familiar beneath his feet. He waved at
his chauffeur: "Drive on. I'll catch another car."
He was quite sure that the war was lost this
time. Rabath turned his back on the Lesser Redoubt
and started the long walk to the South.
A night-hound jumped on the road, glared at him.
Rabath didn't even touch his diskos.
"You know know who I am," he said. "I killed so
many of you."
"Rabath," the night-hound rasped and it was the
first time he had heard a night-hound speak. "I
know you. You are the Night. You are the Dark and
the Mistress of the House is your lady." He
scrambled back from the road and fled between the
trees.
Rabath didn't know how to tame a mansonyagger or
even where to find one. It took him a full three
years to reach the House of Silence.
Lurella waited for him, sitting on the skull of a
giant and gazing into the sky. He sat down next to
her. Rabath's eyes had become hypersensitive after
three years of unceasing night and he could see
the dead sun now, a circle of the most intense
blackness possible.
"The earth current never failed before," he said.
"Well," Lurella said, "I got a bit impatient. I
was waiting for you to turn into the perfect
monster. To become like me. And it wasn't as if
you had to learn anything more after you ordered
Dunja killed."
"You are right." He turned his face away from the
sun and kissed her. Her lips tasted like cinnamon
and anise. She laughed and licked the tip of his
nose with a tongue thin and scaled as a snake. So
beautiful, so strange, he thought, so deadly, and
his heart swelled with pride and joy.
Marat, age 179
Several of the windows of the House doubled as
viewing-screens, looking out upon former times.
One small window, no larger than a porthole,
showed a dismal seashore with the bloated sun
filling half the sky. She was a dull red and
covered with a rash of sunspots.
A man stood on the shore, next to an antique
contraption of brass and ivory. He gazed at the
desolate scene and when something flopped and
cried out in the red distance he shivered and
climbed back on his machine. There came a pulse of
the purest jale and the sands lay empty. Three
heartbeats later the scene started all over again.
Lurella herself was often to be found in front of
another, much wider window.
There was the same sun but now two brilliant
golden sun-flames arced from the surface, throwing
every rounded pebble in sharp relief. A wheeled
city was moving in the distance to keep in the
sunlight.
"My home-time," Lurella had told him the first
time, "when the cities were always moving west."
She would sit in front of window for hours. Was
she dreaming of the sun-lit centuries, yearning
for lovers now dust for an eon?
It didn't matter. She was his true love and every
time he saw her something lit up in his brain, as
if he were a candle and she the flame.
A third window formed an unblinking eye, fixed a
thousand miles above the Night Land. Moving his
fingers apart Rabath could zoom in until he could
see every blade of glowing grass, the very grains
of the black volcanic sand.
Both pyramids were still standing, their beacons
steady. Rabath wondered who ruled the Lesser
Redoubt now. The great-grandchildren of his
Supreme Commander perhaps? And the Viscount of the
Deep Gardens might still be alive.
They had been making love for hours, edging
closer and closer to a shared orgasm. When you
have eternity it pays to study all tricks of
Tantra and walk the thorn-strewn path between
mortal pain and glowing ecstasy. The sleeping-room
with the hovering bed had been twilit, with a
ceiling of glowing stars and distant spirals.
Suddenly all candles ignited and the whole air
seemed to turn golden, to honey.
The lure, Rabath thought. She must be
ravenous. And then he realized that the
candles had never before burned so bright and that
he was in the middle of the House, next to her
mistress. He turned and something sleek and
beautiful, something deadly and without a shred of
mercy, lay next to him.
"I am sorry!" she cried. "I am so sorry. I was
careless, my love. I didn't notice how hungry I
had become." And then Lurella broke his neck and
devoured Rabath's soul.
© tais teng
11 Nov 2011
Back
to Night Lands
|