by Brett
Davidson
There were five barbican complexes spaced regularly
about the perimeter
of the Dark Palace, each with a portal scaled for the egress of an
armed column. Despite their grand size they were recessed behind flat
and bare stages and flanked by towers that were obviously major
concentrations of ordnance. These killing floors were pitted and marked
with the evidence of generations of caustic fire and even now, standing
by the gate that had jammed open, the Watchman felt themselves to be
caught in the reticulations of hidden gunsights. It was only after the
assurance of Pallin that there was no living or mechanical activity
detectable that they approached the looming portal.
It is the default position of a good fortification that
the failure of
its power seals it shut. The fact that the door was open implied a
trap, but it also required of them a simple choice: they could risk
entrapment in fulfilling their mission, or they could leave with the
certainty of failure. Therefore they entered, leaving a party at the
gate, ready to escort any survivors on their return to the
Redoubt. Pallin, Vyrkin, Ferox and half a dozen others went in.
Pallin’s map, with its gleanings from unimaginably
ancient architects’
designs combined with the reports of the Tower’s seers and previous
Watch expeditions, proved to be essentially accurate. The five-fold
symmetry of the glacis was repeated in the internal labyrinth, with
passages taking turnings according to the divisions of a pentagon. It
was almost as if the Palace was one gigantic quasi-crystalline array.
As a decorative motif and as a point of focus for the
Redoubt’s
devotees of numerology, the cinquefoil was familiar and reassuring, but
here in its obsessive articulation at every scale and in every detail
it was oppressive. Its only ease to the soul was that it gave the
assumption of predictability to their movements and even that suggested
something of an insidious entrapment. Pallin had to remind himself that
this place had been built by human beings like himself, so perfect was
the inversion of the light-clogged cities of the Redoubt in this place
of shadows and domineering geometry.
The barbican opened to a marshalling yard, one of five
nexuses of the
great tracks and conduits that ringed the Palace between the curtain
wall and the domicile zone. It was a full and complex space, but
orderly in its alignment of massive parallel rails and lines that
crooked and converged in the distance to either side. Stalled units of
mobile cannon and other machines loomed massively in rows over their
heads in the darkness but they were long dead and cold and were
sketched only cursorily by their visors.
At the far side of the yard, the scarp of another wall
confronted them,
and another gatehouse. They entered cautiously and took stock of their
position.
"Which way, ser Monstruwacan?"
Pallin consulted a small glowing device for a while.
"Left beyond the
next turn. Straight ahead. Right and then left to a small hub
chamber... judging by the cycle of movements I see in a few machines
that are active here, it may be well to wait there a few minutes to
make another survey before moving on."
"So you can see the activity of the Palace?"
Pallin put his hand to his lower face thoughtfully, a
gesture that
seemed absurd with his armour. "Of course - and some system or master
is still directing that activity."
The temperature dropped noticeably as they proceeded
down the inner
corridors. Rimes of frost that were solidified air formed on the slick
black walls, giving them the strange appearance of shot velvet. As they
reached out to touch the soft-seeming patterns of ice, heat radiated by
their armour caused them to sublimate like the fancies they appeared to
be.
The Palace was filled not only with frost and shadows,
but with voices,
and these were an overt sign that the Palace did indeed live on in its
mechanical way. At first their sound might have been caused by the
wind, modulated through the halls and vents of the place, but they were
too coherent and too inflected with the impression of intent to be
natural tricks. The first utterances that they heard were in old
languages that even Pallin did not know, but soon they began to be
heard in the proper Set Speech, though the phrases that they
articulated were too odd to make entire sense.
"Serem," said the draught, as light as a breath on his
cheek. "Serem
shah... ah yes, that’s right, you cannot forget me... surely you must
see?" The words of men long dead now. Sometimes he thought that
he had killed them himself.
"Oh yes, I remember, and still I see," he whispered in
return.
The insidious dialogue continued. "A safe man I do not
want..."
It was a woman now, still living, a prize he sought and
could not keep.
"Dear Hecane... sometimes I am forced to admit to myself that
friendship is better than love and thus I did not lose after all. Tell
me: is this a deception or a realization?"
The voice was unreal, and did not answer.
"Can no love last forever?"
"Serem," said the wind. "Serem shah... carryn aey, werr
te onnn..."
"Can you hear the voices Monstruwacan?" Vyrkin
asked. His voice
jarred and the interruption was simultaneously a release and an insult.
"They burn that capacity out of us, or so they suppose, for I can still
hear a whisper and it will not stop. What is it that you hear?"
"Oh yes, I hear," Pallin told him, concealing his
irritation. "I hear
the history of this place - the voices of ghosts, if you will."
"And they do not effect you?"
"No more than I need them to. That was why was selected.
Many others
would not be so lucky to be immune, I would think."
The Captain was wistful. "This Palace is like one single
machine or
even a living thing. It has an integrity and an intent and I know that
it could have the will to destroy or corrupt us. Each of us, in the
Tower and on the Land, is right to think that the glimpses of something
moving here are more than shadows magnified. It is so much more sure
and definite than that: it has a shape and scuttles like a spider and I
am sure that it is intelligent because it toys with us. I know the need
for the safety of our souls, but nonetheless, this place was human, and
I wonder why this thing should be at home and whether we could be
properly suited..."
Now what a many-faceted gem that confession was, Pallin
thought,
carefully tallying. Wonder and a demon. He noticed a change in the mood
of the Watchmen. Their minds seemed sharper, more alert. The danger
excited them, as he himself was excited, but there was an admixture of
other emotions too: familiarity, fatalism and hope...
Hope - another significant datum to add. He made a
mental note, knowing
that that particular grain of feeling was vital, even if he could not
guess why yet.
They went on, carefully. Finally, after a few more stops
to rest and
make observations, they came to the residential concatenation of the
Palace. They had none of the close and rich warmth of the Redoubt's
home spaces. Their order was more complex than that of the obviously
military facilities, but no less relentless, with vast piers of stone
and metal rising in fixed constellations of pentagons and rhomboids.
These columns were wound about with thick angular coils of segmented
dwellings, each pier and its attendant structures fitting as neatly as
the parts of a locked puzzle. Laid even more tightly upon them were
lines of effigies of men and women so close in their contorted
complementary poses that there was barely any space at all between them.
The structures seemed in their thick aggregation not so
much like a
once-living stack of towns as a hive or the mills of a calculating
engine, now jammed and stalled.
The analogy was probably not unfit, Pallin thought to
himself. There
was an eccentric colleague of his, with a similar interest in the
systems of hive entities, and he had compared the creatures to crude
eidognostic machines. He had explained that it did not matter if, for
example, bees were intelligent or not, as their hive itself was a
machine that moved individual insects about as if they were units in
the calculation of an enormous equation. The man had built a beehive to
prove his point and amusingly, it did indeed function passably well as
a calculating instrument, receiving inputs and dispensing outputs with
a rough efficiency. "And the bees of knowledge know nothing," he
reminded Pallin. "Nothing at all." The experiment had cast new
light on the dynamics of his own terrarium.
And even now emptied of human life was this Dark Palace
likewise a
‘thinking’ hive-machine? Close by would they really find its face, or
would it be visible only from the heights of the Tower of Observation?
Despite Vyrkin’s certainty, the thing that inhabited, the ‘demon’ or
‘spider’ might be simply an illusion caused by the Palace's residual
function, or some new motive power that had come into it and was
working its gears once more. Supposing it was real, was it a face or a
mask? If either was true, perhaps the difference was meaningless...
The Watchmen saw none of this in their explorations. All
they saw were
the endlessly interlocking diamond-shaped rooms and the plaza-arenas
between the bases of the piers. Of course they did not see anything: a
bee does not need to know.
Pallin looked closely at one of the climbing
processions. Each of the
persons depicted might have been lifelike in size, though they were
smaller than the present race of the Redoubt. There was a commonality
in the details of their features, as if - and this was probably the
case - he was regarding the portraits of a dynasty. For all their
reduced stature, they had a dignity to them that he found moving, as he
did their antiquity. These people were his unknown ancestors after all,
all gone, all lost. He thought that he could find records for his
own line that led back to the Foundation of the Last Redoubt - but not
before...
The image of a child dead for aeons seemed to look
directly back at
him. The frost on her face had the softness of the fine hair of living
skin and the details of her features were not unlike those of his own
clan. She was familiar, and yet unfamiliar - and therefore not a little
disturbing.
Enough sentiment, he chided himself. What is the order
here? The
figures were in poses that were contrived and unnatural and therefore
intentionally significant. They were in groups of three under the signs
of strange monsters. The first triad stood under a beast with curling
horns and a thick fleece and consisted of a relatively tall man with
dark hair like a child and burning eyes, a woman and a man holding a
sphere and a staff. The next triad was under another horned animal, but
one of more massive proportions. This group consisted of a man
ploughing, a man bearing a key and another with a serpent and a spear.
The third group, this time under a pair of seemingly normal human
twins, depicted a man with a rod, a man digging and a flute player.
After a dozen triads, the pattern repeated with subtly different
actors. There was a secondary cast woven in amongst the thirty-six
archetypes, ordered here in seven groups of seven - a young man with a
diadem and bow, a woman with a lily and a basilisk in her hands while
she rode a sleek aquatic beast and so forth. Each five-sided pier bore
its own interpretation of the same basic pattern, climbing up the piers
into the shadows beyond the range of his lights and the limits of his
visor’s image-enhancement systems.
There was clear structure and variety here, so the
frieze was
apparently a form of allegory or mnemonic. As either, it was
potentially rigid, but the modules of five, twelve-times-three and
seven-times-seven were difficult to reconcile mathematically and so the
complementary trains wound about each other with surprising complexity
and variety without repetition. The artisans and their models may well
have been trapped by rules here, but those rules were engineered to
operate in the manner of gears in a calculating mill, not some simple
closed cycle. It was a fascinating and inexplicable hive of symbols
that he regarded.
Possibly the libraries of the Last Redoubt might explain
the system
here, but in the immediate term, the only explanation of the meaning of
the frieze would lie deeper within the labyrinth of the Palace.
********************************
Beyond the hall of climbing friezes they found other
things, other
things that were disturbing. Artisans often imitate the forms of
living things in the materials available to them so as to wed the
natural and the artificial, and it was not surprising that there should
be the forms of vines and leaves and fruit in the walls of the Palace
as well as life-like effigies of human beings. But woven among
this carven foliage there was a pattern of another sort, dark and
glistening in a way that suggested absence rather than impression.
Looking closely, Pallin felt a synaesthetic hum and almost reached out
to touch the ambiguous ornamentation with his gauntlet - but drew back
when saw a strand tremble as it should not and recognised its
composition. He took a step further back and tilted his head. Suddenly
the imitation pergola that enhanced the greater physical structural
system of the hallway was no longer quaint to him.
"Eaters," he said. "Some thing has woven the very
substance of Eaters
into these walls."
Vyrkin looked at him levelly. "Yes," he confirmed. "Now
do you see the
hope that we see here?"
"Hope?"
"Our antithesis enervated and imprisoned, braided with
honest metal and
thus made our..." He did not complete the sentence, but left a gap for
Pallin’s mind to fill. The tilt of his head conveyed expectation.
Pallin refused to leap to conclusions and by an effort
of will, became
the analyst and took out one of his measuring devices. It told him more
or less what he guessed. These shimmering black grotesque-works were
not true Eaters in their entire integrated power, but rather a sort of
culture, as Vyrkin said, weakened and firmly held within the substance
of the walls. Certainly no fully ‘vital’ Eater could be so bound and it
seemed that what residue of the Earth-Current that ran through this
place - so much less than that which powered and protected the Last
Redoubt - was enough to keep the espaliered pneumavores in place. The
perverse skill of it was impressive, but that judgment begged the
question of its purpose.
He stared at the Captain, demanding an answer.
"There are mysteries to this place," the Watchman told
him. "We cannot
pretend to understand them yet, and yet this place stands, and has
stood for longer aeons even than the Last Redoubt. It was shaped for
men and women, and here it stands, waiting for us to return, wondering
why we have left. We hoped..."
"Hoped?"
"Monstruwacan, can you tell us why it waits with its
door open to us?"
Pallin trembled with a barely suppressed emotion that he
could not
quite define. Was it disgust, was it fascination, was it rage or was it
longing? Was it fear? He could not tell, save to know that it might
overpower him. He made an adjustment to the power conduits of his suit
and reached out once again to touch the wall. The black counter-strain
withered under his fingers. He was reminded a little of his
plant-animals and considered an analogy of integration. He had often
wondered if in the conflict of red and blue among those strange mosses
whether there might be a balanced achieved and one that would last.
Perhaps he saw now the remnants of an attempt to achieve something of
that sort on a larger scale long ago...
He peered closely at the insinuated threads. There was a
species of
butterfly bred in the Underground Fields that had scales on its wings
that achieved an almost perfect deep blackness. Indeed, those
butterflies provided the pigment for one of the two gloves that he wore
under his gauntlets...
This was an abomination, a thing to be destroyed and
anathematised, his
discipline told him - and yet he had no power to do such a thing, not
here, now, with these men. He was also curious, as the Watchmen were.
Perhaps he was even tempted.
Analogies are dangerous things, he reminded himself.
Yet, they might
spark a true understanding...
"Show me more," he demanded.
********************************
They found the black matter of the Eaters woven into the
solid walls
and in all the greater halls and plazas and shafts, they also found
more friezes and tableaus of human beings. Again, as Pallin was able to
determine fairly quickly, the triple systems of five,
twelve-times-three and seven-times-seven archetypes determined the
pattern of pose and costume - though here, there was far more
complexity and variety in variations on the basic themes and in the
arrangement of supporting figures. The bodies were often in contorted
group poses, their faces drawn in expressions that might be agony or a
sick ecstasy of congress. Faces that were frozen solid and seemingly
sculpted out of gleaming marble were made like engraved drawings of
themselves with myriad parallel and hatched black lines. They looked
like art, but they were not artifice. Pallin leaned close to one and
saw a pupil very slowly begin to dilate.
Everywhere these gruesome tableaux stood, not as the
human debris of
some sudden catastrophe, but upon inlaid pavements and under arches, to
make the spaces into grand galleries of perverted art. There was
nothing random or accidental in this synthesis, and nor was it, Pallin
was forced to admit, alien to humanity. The aesthetic principles of
composition that he saw were all too obvious and comprehensible to him.
These horrible museums had a designer or designers who were human or
who troped the human in their thoughts.
One stand - as good a choice for close examination as
any - appeared to
be a group attending childbirth, though the infant had not yet
appeared. Again, there was the slight intimation of a movement and
labour and this made Pallin shudder as he thought of what might be
finally be born an age from now.
Another tableau showed a man with a lyre caught in the
instant of
turning, turning to see a woman, perhaps his lover, snatched away.
Beyond in the shadows, an iron-crowned king and a queen sat upon
thrones, watching. The king seemed amused, but the queen, holding in
her hand a pomegranate, had a certain ironic regard for the woman.
Pallin knew of a myth in which an incident like this occurred and could
read its concentric layers of literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic
meaning. What was significant however was not that there were any
specific meanings, but that there were meanings. That very fact
illuminated the path to the essence of this Palace and sparked his own
hungry desire to find it.
He realised that these people were not dead but
enthralled in an
immeasurably slow pavan. There were means by which they could be
released and brought into quick bright life once more. A surge of the
Earth Current, applied in just the right manner... Among the many
devices that he carried in various sockets in his armour, he had a
device that was capable of delivering a concentrated and modulated
charge of Earth Current. This power would not destroy, but instead
provoke a brief acceleration in the life-rate of a human being. It had
been intended for his own use, should he find himself in desperate
combat, but it could perhaps be applied to some such as these. A few
could be questioned about their roles here, perhaps even rescued,
brought back to the Last Redoubt, assimilated into the culture there...
His hand strayed to a holster near his heart.
No.
The Dark Palace had woven its webs about their souls as
well as their
bodies. A simple migration might well destroy them - and carry whatever
afflicted them into the Redoubt that he was sworn to protect.
He stood up from his examination to face the watchmen
and found that
they had scattered to stand individually by a various groups of the
frozen. They turned to face him expectantly. "This you have seen, and
to this you return?" he asked.
"We do," said the Captain.
"Why?"
"We brought you, hoping that you might understand and
tell us."
"Ah." He folded his arms and thought a while. There was
more to this
than the decipherment of this vile legacy, that was plain. The way the
men stood did not escape him: they were too familiar, too expectant and
too calmly abiding. Did they imagine that monuments might be carved for
them here amongst these undead?
Did they imagine that they projected their love across
the ages to the
time when these women and men were still warmly alive? With the
eventual doom of the Last Redoubt calculated almost to the day, many
people had sought to revise their concept of time and saw the past as
their eventual destiny. Sometimes groups of such believers coalesced
into cults and the Censors had been forced to weed them out. Was that
the case and such a weeding to be his own duty?
No, there was something more immediate and specific in
their minds...
again, it was that hope that he had detected earlier, the hope that
they had spoken of without quite giving it a specific name.
********************************
The gargantuan forest of clan-piers and plazas gave way
to another yard
and circuit of tracks and machines, this time those that were devoted
to the ultimate defence of the central keep itself. Despite the vast
age of the place, it was still unscarred by anything but time. The
Palace had not fallen, but withered when the bright spire of the Last
Redoubt was built. Unfit as they had been, the scale and the
co-ordination of the mighty machines of the Palace were magnificent and
Pallin was awed in spite of himself.
Nor was it mere scale and antiquity that impressed him.
There was a
pragmatic order to the place, but now, having traversed almost a
complete radial cross section, he could see that there was an aesthetic
dimension to it as well. This was something he had never quite
appreciated when looking at his flat, abstract maps. People had lived
their lives surrounded by, embedded in a pattern, and that pattern had
shaped them. They had drawn sustenance from that pattern, that order;
they had used it to stand with knowledge of who they were against the
twilit world of the Age of Darkening.
He shuddered to think of this. The most ancient
archetypes of the race
of true humans before they built their cities of light were here, solid
and black all around him. Solid, black and real.
"And we rejected this solution," he said aloud and
unintentionally.
Vyrkin looked at him, curious, and then nodded. "I often
think about
that simple fact," he said. "Just that simple fact - and then I wonder:
was it wrong for us, or had our imaginations proceeded too far beyond
what we were, and now maybe, now we will understand what we were only
dreaming?"
Dreaming... Pallin shook his head as if to clear his
mind and muttered,
not really engaging Vyrkin in conversation. "Maybe... and they still
dream here now..." There were unconscious thoughts that still had to
make their way to the surface of his mind, their form only vaguely
intimated thus far.
He turned to face the great central Keep, the goal of
his quest. Close
now, not diminished by the distance and altitude of the Monstruwacan
observatory, it was an intimidating structure. It was an odd shape, not
unlike a vast goblet with the main mass hanging overhead and what were
obviously the loopholes of armaments squinted down at them.
Fortunately, these too seemed dead - but the yard was not empty and the
way to the keep was not clear. Filling the space there was an army.
Row upon row of figures stood upon the obsidian flags.
They were not
arrayed to march out, but stood facing each other in symmetrical
formation about a processional way.
They were utterly still to the eye, but Pallin knew that
like those
enthralled in the slow pavan within the forest of piers, they were
still living a strange half-life of symbols and gestures. He inspected
a few, idly noting the badges and devices on the breastplates of the
men and women, and he could see that once again the ubiquitous system
of five, twelve-times-three and seven-times-seven sorted and bound
their number. It was utterly clear to him now that this system was more
than the mechanism of tyranny; the Palace served as a vast mnemonic
system. The Censors’ College of Logomachists would doubtless have an
intense interest in the applied epistemology, but here and now that
motivation was more important than its details. This army and all the
citizenry about were, so to speak, the spokes of the great wheel of
fortune that drove this Palace and his concern was with the axis.
He was about to move on when one face in the crowd
caught his eye. She
was statuesque in a way, though like all of the figures that he had
seen, shorter than the norm that prevailed in the Redoubt. Under the
disturbing glaze of the dark matter there were another anachronistic
features: skin that bore a natural pigmentation, braided coils of hair
the colour of brass, pale eyes like pictures of the daytime sky... He
could sense, like the sound of a bell so vast its tone was below
hearing, the very edge of a feeling. He could not be sure what thought
it was that moved glacier-like though the cold valleys of her brain,
but there was, he supposed, a sense of resignation and maybe even a
sort of contentment.
He looked around. This formation of ranks was not one
ready for battle,
even if such absurd thing as a slow battle could happen. No, they had
returned, they had been welcomed, and they had made their truce.
And who had their enemy been? Not Eaters if this was
their
accommodation, but the greater abstractions of darkness and cold?
Had it been an honorable peace? Truce? Surrender?
He stared into the woman’s open eyes of agate blue,
straining to
understand. Had he stayed a week, she might possibly have perceived the
barest movement, but he did not have the time and she had no thoughts
to shape at his pace. He left her to her slow instants.
The sense of ages assailed him. These people predated
the Redoubt, he
reminded himself. They were fossils of the aeon before the real history
of his world began, sentient but petrified. What could they say?
He turned to the woman warrior again. She was very
beautiful. Her lips
were slightly parted. The possibility was too tantalising: she might be
ready to speak, there might be an attenuated word ready to slip from
her mouth. He longed to hear.
Yes, he decided. It was a violation, a strange and
shocking thing for
this person, but he would do it. If he had been the one standing here,
surely he would want to know what a distant descendant of his had to
say. Surely.
He raised the visor of his helm so that she might see
his face, judging
the risk of frostbite to be low for a brief exposure, and once again
his hand went to the accelerator device. Before he could consider its
workings and his intentions, he took it out, pressed it to the woman’s
temple and released the trigger.
There was a blue flash and the smell of ozone and the
world seemed to
ripple as if seen through water. The woman gasped.
He had at best, only seconds as he counted them, so
Pallin spoke
swiftly. He did not expect her to be tutored in his own tongue of
course, but the Set Speech of the Last Redoubt was the universal,
perfect language and surely some sense of what he might say would be
accessible to her. "Salut," he said. "I am Pallin of the clan
Asphodelos. This is the last age. A greater house than yours we built.
We grew strong there, stronger... and I have come here. I wonder: who
are you? Answer and I will not forget. Answer and remember me."
The expression on her face was one of agony. Desperately
he tried to
read her feelings and thought that he succeeded. She was enduring a
fit, seeing an apparition of a tall man in armour. His mind pressed
upon hers, brutal and questioning. His words were nonsense, but here
was, if not an understanding, something familiar, like a memory from
childhood, from a far age in the past.
"You are a ghost!" she said, amazed, and each quick word
slashed at her
throat like a razor. "Ghost of my premonitions!" Blood speckled her
lips.
"Xhoshd iu ve! Xhoshd
eithagnoni ie mu!" Pallin heard.
And she heard him. In her eyes, a man the colour of ice
flickered and
twitched. High-pitched babble came from him. He was loud, his voice
blared and scraped harshly. "Sapel,
ek Asph, Last age!" These two words
were clear. "Last age!" he
repeated.
She took a deep breath and the air was poisonously cold.
The pain was
unbearable, but she ventured a few more words: "Last age, man of last
age - do you remember me? Have we failed? Why are you here?"
"Demdtor term, aand
dembtor term - nemonehr mu? Kata
mui? Lok einnn?"
Her eyes showed terror.
The words were drawn from her slowly, as if by a line
let down into
deep water. Pallin carefully collected the syllables as they came to
him, pieced them together and tried to divine their sense. She had
grasped with an admirable, albeit relative, quickness the fact that he
was a man from her future, which meant that she knew that her own life
had been attenuated. However, he was not what she had expected and her
thoughts were filled with dread, even despair. His appearance had upset
her sense of what was expected of her future. That was inevitable, but
the exact reason for her despair might be illuminating.
He tried to compose a question, but already he saw that
the charge of
his revivifying device was fading and she was slowing once again. He
might apply its power again, but its repeated use could fatally upset
the compromise of her strange symbiosis and he was no murderer. He put
his gauntlet to her cheek. "We say that we are triumphant," he said.
"Maybe that is vanity... but I have come to learn still. To see you and
know..."
The man was flickering, his voice little more than a
chirp. Had he said
that he had returned? Her heart swelled with the hope that he did
understand after all and that he would join her and her compatriots,
the true humans embarked upon...
Pallin stood for a while regarding the figure once again
frozen into
immobility. He had given her an instant of joyful hope, he realised,
and he had no idea why. She had thought that they had achieved an
understanding for an instant and then time had snatched her away into
the future and that instant would last a millennium or more.
He sealed his helm again and drank the warm air within.
It flooded his
lungs like fire.
The Watchmen were astonished and bombarded him with
questions.
"You stood a whole day there, not moving!"
"She moved and spoke! What did she say?!"
"What did you say?"
Pallin gaped at them, thankful that his helm hid his
face. The men
seemed wrong - loud and sharp; too fast; not quiet, as they should be.
"She was... pleased that I had come here," he ventured.
"Pleased?"
"Why?"
"They know!"
"So they do welcome us, their children!"
He put his hand to his head and wished that he could
massage his scalp.
"I am not so sure," he muttered. I think that she misunderstood me..."
"Yet you made her happy."
"See!" One of the men pointed at the still warrior.
Indeed, there was a
twist to her lips that might be a smile. Her last perceptible thought
was still ringing in his mind like the reverberations of a bell. It was
true, she was pleased, pleased to welcome him here. There was a
symmetry in her feeling: she had felt for a moment - hours - that her
life had been rendered futile by his presence, because there should
have been no later generation than her own, but then she had been
relieved, happy that he had come... back.
The people of the Dark Palace had a purpose and a
desire. They had a
mission and this expedition somehow appeared - to her - to mesh with it
in some way.
He touched her face again and his gauntlet told him that
she was cold.
Her eyes were hard as glass and her mind still. No more answers would
come in this age. Perhaps in a thousand, a million years she would
complete her thought... but he would be dead and dust long before this
happened.
This was irrelevant. He had to know now as much as he
could, or hear
what scholars had to say of his reports within his own years. "There is
a centre to this Palace," he declared, cutting off enquiry. "We must go
there and see what we can find. Now."
The stout pedestal of the keep was apparently solid,
with no apertures
in its sculpted and battered sides. The only violation of its symmetry
was in a stair that zig-zagged up to the main body in the narrow gully
between two buttresses. Pallin increased the magnification of his visor
to see if there were any traps. He did not expect traps to be obvious
of course, but he did note that the treads and risers were proportioned
to make a slow careful pace easiest - too broad for an easy stroll, or
to take two at a time while running. Their scale varied too, sometimes
suddenly, and this required concentration. Despite this inconvenience,
he instinctively found a rhythm in the path and was even able to devise
a simple melody to guide his steps. That of course was the intention of
the architects - to impose such a conditioning discipline upon all who
entered, as they had done so successfully in the greater body of the
Palace.
"What is your plan?" Vyrkin asked, craning to look up at
the loopholes
that squinted back at him.
"That we climb," Pallin replied.
"And that is all? Do you not suppose that there may be
traps?"
"We are already in the trap, Captain."
"Ah."
So they climbed. The stair allowed only single file, and
a slow pace at
that, but Pallin was right in that there were no obvious traps or
impediments. The merely remained under the eyes of the deactivated guns
for the entire climb. As expected, the portal was wide open to welcome
them. It was there that they could see directly the might of the armour
that sheathed the Keep as the passage that followed from there crooked
and turned through several fathoms of solid metal that still sizzled
weakly with the Earth Current. No fire fell from them though, and again
they were let through at last to the Great Hall that occupied the
centre of the Keep. It was deserted.
The darkness of the Great Hall was complete and as thick
as oil.
Gradually, gleaning echoes and traces of leaked energy, Pallin’s visor
sketched and then filled the contours of the volume. Inevitably, the
hall followed the ubiquitous cinquefoil pattern. However, instead of
the clustered piers that had supported the mass dwellings of the outer
residential zone, the roof of this hall was held up by ten awesome
humanoid figures. There were five atlantids and five caryatids,
alternating with each other in a ring about its perimeter. Their arms
were raised and they clasped each other’s hands to make great arches
between their bodies. From these points, the ribs of the vaulted
ceiling arched still higher, and there at the central point depended a
structure whose complications suggested a mighty lantern, but its
details were lost in impenetrable shadow that not even his visor could
penetrate.
Vyrkin stepped back from Pallin and wheeled about with
his arms
outstretched dramatically. "Magnificent!" he declared. "And yet, see
how easy it has been with your guidance to attain this place now! We
are human and this place welcomes us as the model of how we might truly
live abroad from the Redoubt, of how we might master the Night Land."
Pallin said nothing.
Vyrkin noticed his reticence. "I know what you are
thinking,
Monstruwacan, even if I do not have your skills and senses," he
laughed. "Humans abandoned this place because it was ‘Not Proper’, but
the fact is that it was built before its time, before its proper
citizens existed. We left and it ruminated and prepared its models and
we are come back now to see what we should be and it is pleased. It is
proper, Monstruwacan; it is right and it is ready!"
Was it proper? Could it ever have been proper? The
circle-and-pyramid
plan of the Last Redoubt made a cosmic pattern known in prehistoric
tongues as a mandala, orienting and fixing an essential concept of self
and order in the midst of chaos. As had been amply demonstrated, the
Dark Palace likewise drew upon this concept, but Pallin had found it by
far more didactically restrictive. The architects of the Redoubt had
wisely embraced the abstract, but the cycles and meanders of the
concentric zones of the Dark Palace were, despite their complicated
elaboration, utterly constraining. That flaw, as much as any physical
weakness was what rendered it untenable as an abode of true humans,
Pallin thought. True humans seek to explore, embrace or defy their
environments - even those they make - but they do not allow themselves
to become espaliered upon them like a trained vine. It had been ‘Not
Proper’ and it remained ‘Not Proper’.
"This place is a prison," he said quietly. "That implies
that there is
Panopticon - take me there."
Predictably, there were five more stairs rising from
each of the major
sectors of the hall, each no doubt named and themes according to the
divisions of the army outside. The details were irrelevant, the climb
again unopposed.
The Panopticon itself was at first both splendid and
inexplicable.
According to the educated guesses of his visor systems, the space was
large and approximately spherical. What lay within this globe was
beautiful: a great structured sprawl of diamond-points, each glittering
with significance. It might have been some form of planetarium, for it
shone like one of the galaxies of myth... but it was not a galaxy.
The nest of a watcher and manipulator might be walled
with screens
showing views of every quarter of its domain, but screens could only
show what could be seen in an instant and the master of this labyrinth
was concerned with the occurrences of ages, not seconds. Those points
of light were vials, each of which preserved a sample of germ cells.
The demon that sat at the centre of this field of lights
was watching
the displays of generations, sorting and computing the slow tides of
genetics. Incursions into the Palace by human beings were opportunities
for testing and sampling and this great contrivance was a sort of
telescope with which it watched the human civilisation of the Last
Redoubt itself.
And the array of vials was more than a telescope for
observing the
world, it was an instrument for effecting change. In each age, heroes
came to this Palace, thinking to test themselves and the demon would
examine them and measure them against its models and it would cull them
or add them to its collection... and then it would allow only certain
individuals to return to the Redoubt to propagate their line.
It had been in the genealogical tables of the Watch that
Pallin had
first noticed the pattern that had implied this centre and this master.
When the map had been made for him, it was confirmed. He had followed a
fine red line of blood through the labyrinth to this monster and no
doubt it had expected someone like him to come.
Now it welcomed him.
© Brett
Davidson
10 Jan 2005
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