Silence of the Night

The Preparation for the Going Out has not changed since four million years ago: the ways of the Forces and Powers are made known, oaths taken, information too delicate to be known to the foe removed from the brain. There is a time of fasting, and an exposure to concentrations of the Earth Current and other salvific rays and radiations. Then a last meal, consisting of certain fruits, otherwise long extinct, kept in cultivation just for this ceremony, and never eaten at any other time. The capsule is implanted, and the other ways of swift self-destruction taught, in case the capsule, for whatever reason, should fail. Final warnings and admonitions are laid upon the soul of the Adventurer by the Captain of the Gate. Final memories and testaments are imprinted by means of the brain-elements into a book of activated metal leaves.

Only those may go who are young men, unmarried, unapprenticed, unindebted, unindentured. Orphans, or those with no living brothers to carry on their family names and gene patterns may not go, for the eugenicists will not permit a culling of our boldest over centuries, lest we breed ourselves into cowardliness. Neither the old, nor the sickly may venture forth, nor, during those aeons when insanity and crime existed, could a man go unless a jury of his neighbors bound themselves by twelve oaths that he was hale and of sound mind and good character. No man who had taken orders from the Monstruwacans could go, nor who served the Architects, nor a man who had suffered neuro-alteration, or who possessed an augmented soul; nor could pass out from our gates any dreamer who dreamed of strange things unknown to other men, if he could not account to the oneiropaths of the origin of each dream; and no woman, ever.

There are some tools, like the hand-axe or the hull of a ship, which, having achieved a most graceful shape, need no further change. The harness and gear of the Out-venture has not changed in all the ages since the time of the Seventh Race of Men: above a long vest of padding, I wore armor made of the same imperishable metal as the Last Redoubt; my helm was gray as well, without plume or device. A dun mantle of living fibers covered my shoulders, able to generate heat against the piercing chill of the Night Land, and to comfort the soul. In my script I carried a dirk of energized metal, a dial that could be read by touch, and a needle that pointed toward the geomagnetic aura of the Great Redoubt. Here also were tablets of nutriment, and the powder whose virtue was to condense water out of the air: no spring in the Night Land could be trusted, either because of soil contamination, or strange lights, or haunting. A cup could purify the water, and also be held over the mouth and nose when passing through thin air or clouds of venom or fine particles.

The Diskos is the perfect weapon. It is as if alive, and charged with Earth-Current, and the blade is a sharpened circle of massy weight which gives off a terrible light and dread low roaring when it spins. And when it is quiet, it is tense with a terrible quiet, so that to touch the still blade with a finger is to feel its hidden energy tingling. The blade is held on forks. The shaft of the weapon is cunningly made, so that the hand of the man who owns it can make the shaft grow longer or shorter, so that the head of the weapon is closer or farther, depending on the size of the monster to be smitten, and the length of the needed stroke. The charge in the weapon can electrocute even insubstantial attackers, or purge bad air. Legend says the Hog was slain by a stroke of the first of these weapons made by Carnacki the Artificer.

We carry no lamp nor candle in the Night Land, for the temptation caused by light-hunger would be too great, and watchful things would be drawn to any glimmer of wholesome radiance. The Diskos gives off a flare of white fire when we smite, and its fearsome shining extends as far as the weapon-stoke reach, and lasts for the duration of the stroke, no longer.

If a monster stands too far off to be pole-axed with our weapon, it is better not to see them, but to let them pass by, unmolested.

Neither is it hale to peer too narrowly or overlong at any creatures above the human range of life force, lest they bring nightmares, and nightmares attract the hungers of the Pneumovores as blood in the sea, back when seas still lived, attracted the shark packs who ruled those waters then. It is better to walk blind in the darkness, and see only what the Night Hearing shows.
 

When I stepped out into the bitter chill of the Night Land, the gate slid silently and swiftly shut behind me. The gate-way was dark, and all the masters of the Watch, the squires and custodians of the gate-house, had been present, standing on the great slope of the downward stairs in their gray armor of imperishable metal. Each one held his Diskos, but the disks were still, and the weapons were not lit, so that even the tiny hum and spark of those weapons would not escape into the Night Land and tell that some child of man crept forth.

I passed out from the North-West gate. A signal went from corridor to corridor through the great pyramid, so that, as I crept forth, a sudden great commotion was heard to the South-Eastern side of the Pyramid. I heard it dimly, and it sounded like the roar of the hidden sea that can be sometimes heard in the great pipes below the pyramid, from whence we take our water. This was meant to distract the watchers of the night world; for armigers and fulgurators were firing rockets and culverins from the low balconies (say, perhaps only half a mile above the land) across the gray dunes and down into the deep pits of the Country of Wailing.

Even from across so wide a distance, miles away from us and around the far side of the mighty pyramid, I heard the whooping, deep, low sounds of the Wail, and I could feel it tremble in my teeth, as if a great hill or mountain were to utter its grisly lament. A great Voice uttered from the Mountain of the Voice, and it was answered by the terrifying mirth that issued from unseen mouths in the Country Whence Comes the Great Laughter. And not long after, I heard the terrible baying of the Night-Hounds, but I thought they were issuing south, toward the commotion. Soon also came the wind-roaring from the underground warrens of the Giants whose kilns lie somewhat to the south and east. This clamor showed that they had lifted their great doors, for the sounds of their air-machinery can be clearly heard when their iron doors gape open, and the Giants rage forth across the pits and craters of the Night Land, thick as ants from an antish fort of dirt.

I moved quietly, and left the prints of my metal boots in the soft sand and ash that was gathered all around the foot of the pyramid. These ashes were alleged to be the remnants of great beasts and beings that had been destroyed, ninety-one hundred years ago, blasted by a flood of the energies of the Earth-Current down the armored sides of the pyramid, a flood so great that the mighty home was said to be darkened for three hours or more, and all the lamps were drained.

When I came to the Circle, it was a tube of transparent metal held perhaps nine inches from the soil. It was small enough that I could step over it in one step; and yet, on this small light, the life of all the hundred thousand who lived in the Pyramid depended. Without it, the thoughts of the Darkness would have reached from House of Silence, or the Quiet City, the Dark Palace, or other places of power, past all our walls and gates and doors, into the hearts and dreams of our children, there to grow and swell until we were no longer human, and our souls be made fit for the Enemy to consume. Such small and frail things defend us.

The clamor of the barrage meant to cover my departure was still going on when I passed over the Circle.

Then the thought of mankind was gone. Instead I felt in my brain the silent watchfulness of the Night Lands, pulsations inhuman and remote from earthly life like the pressure of a coming storm against the metal fabric of my helmet.

I was alone. For the first time since birth, since before birth (for prenatal empathies are drawn into the Mind Weaving as well) I was all alone.
 

All the old passions and fears of a dawn-age man were pounding in my thoughts: fear and giddiness and terror and self-will; lust and anger and sloth and a dozen extravagances. I had been trained and Prepared, but this was an intoxication I could not fathom. I went from being pure to being a beast man in one step.

No one else could have endured it. I was a retromancer of ancient recollection. In me dwelt a dozen lives or more of heroes from our past, all their passions and their memories. Like the call of a trumpet to arms, those ancient visions stirred within my breast. My fear was transformed to cool fury, my sudden passions into passionate calm tension, an eagerness to go and do great deeds.

We are not mere thinkers and savants, we men of the Seventeenth Race. Our perfection is not a trap to weaken our resolve. The blood of heroes still was in me, and all the imperfections needed to stir that blood to anger and devotion. Nothing other than being human will allow a man to stand in the silence of the Night, and not be extinguished.

I thought of my father, and my love for him gave life to my limbs. Conquering fear, I stepped away.
 

Scholars spend lifetimes classifying the genus and species of the horrors scratching at our windows and gates. Some are like us, occupying three dimensions of space and one of time, have blood and bones and brain. Apish abhumans, as well as taller giants, many-armed abominations, wide-mouthed ghouls and mantachores who once had upright stance: these are the least of our foes. Samples of their blood and brain matter show that their ancestors once may have been human, but they adapted to the endless dark, were mutated by the spiritual influences of those great Powers that walk in the Night, or were changed by energies released over aeons by gaps, pits and fissures in the crust of the dead earth, or by poisons they released themselves with the machines we hear pounding, forever pounding, in the warrens and sunken places of the siege against us.

Whether the Enemy builded the mile-high towers to the West, or whether it was the ancestral races of man whom scholars say dwelt outside the Last Redoubt in legendary times, no one knows.

The Silent Ones have never been known to slay a human being who did not first trouble them, or trespass into the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill. For this reason, there are some who claim they are no part of the Host of the Night, no more than the lampreys that cling to the bellies of sharks are sharks.

Others say that they are indeed the leaders and archons of the great siege against us, and that they do not deign to kill merely out of their delicacy. The books of the future have been examined by the Monstruwacans, and this is one of the pieces of information known to be on the Interdicted List: this means it is some knowledge visions have confirmed that no future generation of mankind will ever discover. It is held not lawful to inquire into the matter, since the line of inquiry is already foreknown to be unprofitable, and the time the human race has left to answer all the questions of the human condition is limited. We shall never know.
 

The river of mud had dug itself a deep canyon all around, and, subsiding over centuries, had left behind many lesser valleys, swales, and scars, a land of mud-pits and swampy ox-bows, all embraced between two steep walls cut and rutted with the erosion of dead centuries past. It was two weary hours of scrambling up and down crumbling slopes and splashing across puddles of frozen or of boiling mud, before I reached those steep and rotten canyon walls; and another five hours of fruitless attempts and many falls before I found a crooked switchback leading up past chipped and pockmarked walls of mud-covered stone to the surface of the world again.

As I emerged from the canyon, I came once more into the sight of our mighty home. There it loomed, a pyramid of human life, mile on mile rising in the distance, balcony upon balcony and embrasure upon embrasure. The differences in texture of the surface armor as where lines of fortresses or roofed townships had been erected along the dormers, all this was erased into smoothness because of the distance.

The arched windows of the Sunderhouse men, the long and narrow window-slits of the Patrones, all these architectural curios which figure so prominently in our history and public debates, from here, were invisible. Even the acre-wide aerodrome bays, long lost and long forgotten, a remnant from an earlier aeon when the air of the outer world was different, even these were so tiny as to be invisible discolorations in the rank on rank of blazing light.

Craning my head back, I could glimpse a spark of light, brighter than most, at the apex of the converging lines of the pyramid, vanishing in the distance overhead. Of the Utmost Tower itself, or the sanctuary of the Monstruwacans, I could see nothing. Those high and distant cities which sit on the uppermost stories of the pyramid, just under the armor of the penthouse, names famed in our romances and literature: Aeloia where Scarapant once climbed to wed his lost Angelica, Golden Aeyre, made famous by the poet Erebophoebus, and Highguard West in whose greenhouses the beloved last pines grow, which will not grow in the deep farms and fields buried beneath our pyramid, none of these were even visible at all; but a tiny mote I thought perhaps was the ninety-fathom tall Major Pumphouse by the shore of the roofed-in Attic Lake glinted in my eye, the rumored fountainhead of the Hundred-Story Waterfall, designed by the Architect Ellivro.
 

I will not detail the times of my marching. Many watches passed as I stalked in the night, and when the dial told me to rest, I rested, with my spirit alert about me to wake me lest some dread and deathly Power come nigh. I ate of the tablets of the scrip, and grew lean and clear-minded, for they feed only the soul, not the flesh.

The first creature I slew was a giant who came suddenly out of a sandy place near a smoke-hole, and the moss bushes deadened the noise of his approach.

He meant to dash my brains out with a cudgel, but I avoided the blow, and cut a great gash in his side with the stroke of my Diskos, penetrating hide and blubber, and the lighting stabbed through his body. He wept as he lay dying, and his sobs sounded almost human. I struck again, meaning to decapitate, but the blow landed clumsily, biting into his massive shoulder-plates and collar-bones. Nonetheless, this second blow snapped his neck, and a surge of power from the hilts of my weapon blackened the face and head of the man-creature, killing him. He was nigh twice my height: his wrist was thicker than my thigh.

That first encounter was more danger than the next six or seven I slew, for by then I was grown wary and cunning. The long weeks beneath the pulsing mental pressure of the Night Lands, the hooting voices, the strange distant lights making omens to each other, the grisly viciousness of the mutated beasts, the loathsome things that crawled like slugs, all awoke in me a deadly warlike nature that surely my oldest ancestors, from the pyramid's earliest times, must have known.

I spend more miles crawling than I did walking; I avoided far more than I slew, and I covered my tracks after. Only when I could not avoid it, as when I was in a blind canyon, or had to pass a guarded spot, did I encounter the night creatures. I smote at monsters from behind, or when they slept, or when they went to the bubbling pools of black water to sip the salty liquid.
 

As I passed through the diseased land of the abhumans, crawling from ditch to ditch, and hiding in the ash of cold crater-mouths, I saw the race destined to replace us, walking on their back paws with large steps across a land the dark powers had given them: stoop-shouldered, crooked-legged men with powerful chests, arms as thick as my leg. Their nails were black like iron, and their hairy pelts were thick and coarse, like the pelts of shaggy wolves from a former age; their mouths were like the muzzles of baboons, with canines keener than my dirk. They had no tool more complex than the thigh-bone of a Night-Hound that they used for truncheons; and their dams and their spratlings were equally unlovely.

But it was not their crudeness that repelled me; it was the wisdom in their eyes, their wolf-eyes glowing green beneath thick brow ridges. I saw in their expressions a cruelty, a haunting and solemn cruelty, humans are not prone to know.

These things thought more like men than the Night Hounds, the giants, or the behemoths, and they were cunning to guess my ways. And so they grew aware of me, and hunted me.

With the abhumans on my trail, I was driven east, back toward the Pit of Red Smoke. I entered the rocky and broken terrain surrounding the lip of the Deep Valley which encloses the Pit, a land of cliff and standing stones. The land here was tormented, as if giants with axes had split the ground and flung huge boulders every way (though our records show no trace that the giants had ever done such a thing, here); and often I came across rows of pillars and the rubble where walls had been.

Over several watches the abhumans hunted me, and I needed to rely upon my memory of the maps I had studied in the House of the Monstruwacans of this bit of terrain, so that a retreat down some promising canyon would not turn into a cul-de-sac, and death.

When the Pit of Red Smoke was belching opaque clouds, and the land was dark, I moved; when the Pit was calm, and red shine hung on the bellies of low clouds, and red shadows fell across the stark rocks of the land, I hid.

At such times, I could see the Last Redoubt, shining and beautiful in the distance. But, nearer at hand, I saw the Lesser Dome of Too Many Doors, windowless and crusted with pentagonal cracks as if it had been the shell of a monstrous tortoise.

And, also I saw, to one side and beyond it, the lowering profile of the Northwest Watching Thing. This was the oldest and most cunning of the Watching Things, and it was several miles closer to the Redoubt than it had been in our ancestors’ times. For perhaps half a million years, the Thing had lifted its mighty arm, crusted with moss and debris, and held it aloft to point toward the pyramid, hand supine, its spread fingers longer than tree boles. A lake had slowly gathered from the atmospheric moisture in the hollow of its great dark palm, and the heat from its body prevented the lake from turning to ice. None knew what the gesture presaged, but it filled all who beheld it with dread.

Once, two hundred years ago, a discharge of ground-lighting had ignited near the Northwest Watching Thing, and in that flare a Monstruwacan named Semelus had seen the smile slowly spreading across its mask-parts, observed the glitter of its strange eyes, and the sight of it had sickened him, so that he bit the capsule and died before his soul was wounded beyond recovery.

As I stood observing the terrible silhouette of the Northwest Watching Thing, it must have felt the pressure of my gaze, for I sensed a pulse of hideous thought cross the darkness of the air. It was like a horn-call, but utterly silent. Immediately I heard stealthy noises in the dark to one side of me; I fled the other way, as quickly as stealth allowed, and, in the dark, climbed a cliff, with nothing to guide me but touch to find the hand-holds and toe-holds across the icy rock. I had to draw off my gauntlets to do it, because the fingers of the gauntlet were too clumsy for this work, but the stone soon sucked all the heat and feeling out of my fingers; with numb hands, I could not feel where the stone was, and, in the dark, the rocky cliff seemed to no longer be vertical.

I heard sniffing noises underfoot, and caught the odor of abhumans thick in the air.

All at once, blinding me, a flare from the Pit of Red Smoke rose up, and I could see the cliff; I was but a little yard from the top. I scrambled to get over the rocks. The light was splashing against the height where I was, but the canyon I had just crawled from was black to my eyes, though I heard a low sardonic mutter of abhumans speaking to each other when I became visible. For some reason, it chilled me to hear them, so calm, so self-controlled, when they spotted me; I did not know what words they said, but their tones were dry and saturnine.

When I crested the brink, I heard a low, mocking laugh coming from my left. Here, out from the shadow of a tall rock, and into the leaping red light, came three hunched figures. Apelike, they moved on feet and knuckles, carrying their truncheons in their teeth, but they each rose to their back feet when they rushed toward me, grasping their truncheons in one or both forepaws; and they smiled grimly as they came. The stench from their powerful arms was terrible.

I drew the Diskos, and felt the power in the haft enter my hands and warm them; the flare of light, the terrible roar of the spinning blade, caused the foremost abhuman to hesitate; I slashed him across the belly, and lighting threw his guts unwinding from the ghastly wound; and his body jumped a yard into the air from the electric shock, arms and legs jerking; the other two closed in on either side of me, and aimed truncheon-blows at my legs and head.

One blow struck my leg-armor, which rang like a bell; and I fell, so the other blow passed my helmet, and struck the rock to one side of me with such force, the rock splintered and flew in pieces. By this mere mischance was my life saved.

At that same moment in time, the flare from the Red Pit ended, and black smoke smothered all the light. The Diskos, either by fate, or because of its own wiliness, ceased to spin and roar, so the blade went out; and the hulking mass of the abhuman I felt move near above me became invisible in the sudden dark.

Awkwardly I rolled to one side. Something in my motion startled the abhuman stooping over me. I heard his truncheon whistle through the air, I felt rock-splinters from his superhuman blow thrown, tinkling, against my armor. I struck upward with the shaft of my Diskos. There was no flare, no noise, since I struck with the insulated part of the haft, but I must have struck the soft parts of his lower belly; for he lost his footing in the dark. There was a slither of pebbles, and rush of air, and, with a low, sarcastic mutter like a curse, I heard the great beast-man fall. He must have pitched off the brink in the dark; for I heard the sound of his body passing through the air below. There were hisses from down below in the canyon, low words suggestive of irony and contempt, and perhaps a scoffing laugh or two, when the body fell among those gathered there.

I rose to my feet and lit my weapon, and the blade uttered its roar. Now there was no light from the red pit; the only light here was the flare from my blade. The remaining beast-man straightened up, and with a gesture of distaste, put one paw before his wolfish eyes in the sudden glare and stepped slowly back.

He hefted his club and measured the distance between us with his eyes. He saw that he had reach, and a more powerful blow than I did, and yet he was wary, for the mere touch of my weapon was death, for the spinning blade flashed and roared with frightful living energies. The creatures unseen in the darkness below and behind me must have been able to see the combat, for we were nigh the edge: and I heard hisses and grunts as they called out in their language smirking advice, sardonic japes and deprecations to their unbeloved comrade. From his eyes I could see he was not comforted by their calls.

At that same moment, I felt in my soul a profound chill, and I knew it was some force from the House of Silence breathing courage and inhuman intelligence into this degenerate beast-man. He picked up one of the fallen truncheons in his second forepaw, so that he held two: I saw he meant merely to feint with one and smite with the other; no matter which way I turned, he would surely smite from the other way, and have me. I am not a small man, nor a weak one, but I was as a child before this apelike mass of brawn and cunning.

He stepped hugely forward, and my spirit shrank within me, and his spirit grew like a terrible and hungry shadow.

At that moment, I heard a murmur like the roar of the sea. To my left, miles away, the Last Redoubt was visible, balcony upon balcony shining, a wall of light. People had been watching my duel. When I had first lit my weapon and struck at the first abhuman, surely men, women, and children standing in the pyramid windows, or over their telescopes, must have cried out. Perhaps only a gasp, of a word of hope, but, amplified by a million voices, it became a strong noise on the wind of the world; only now had that cry reached me.

How that sound filled my heart! I saw doubt twist the sneering muzzle of the abhuman; his eyes (for at that moment, seeming almost human) were troubled with sorrow and regret.

While he paused, I snapped my Diskos-shaft out to its polearm length, and performed a running lunge called a flèche; the monster raised his heavy bone club to parry, but it is no easy matter to parry a spinning disk; my blade skipped off and around his parry his and smote his wrist. With the second club he swung a round wide blow toward my head, but I lifted my trailing hand high, to catch the truncheon on the ringing shaft of my weapon, a foot above my helm; and sparks flew up. Of its own, the shaft of my weapon extended itself and drove its spinning blade down along his arm and into the armpit of my foe.

It would have been a minor wound, for his body was very great, had my weapon been a minor weapon, for the cut itself was not deep; but the power and shock of the earth-current shining from my blade entered his wound and made his limbs jerk and jump. Before he could recover, I stepped under his reach, swtiched to a one-handed grip, and guided the Diskos to continue eating into his side on its own. I heard the whine as the spinning blade cut through bone, and the blood sprayed backward in a fan, and the blade-heat lit the coarse hairs of his arm afire. Meanwhile I drew my dirk with my off- hand, stepped very nigh to him and struck into his great hairy chest at the spot where my trainers told me the heart might be.

There was no heart, but I saw, beneath the bubbling gush of blood and puddings, a cold black orb of shining black stone. I knew not what this was: it was some artifice of the enemy, something his masters had put in him. Even so, the abhuman, though he was torn open in the chest, wounded in the wrist, arm, and armpit, I saw the unclean spirit enter his eyes once more. He dropped the two clubs and grappled with me. Such was his strength that even armor as stern as mine creaked and complained; I could not breathe, and my ribs were bending.

The Diskos, as if of its own accord, shortened on its haft, so that it was the size of a short ax rather than a pole-arm, and I threw my elbow over his huge shoulder as if to embrace my foe. The Diskos flew like a pendulum and fell against the small of the creature's hairy back. I severed his spine, even as he nearly broke mine. The low roar of my weapon became shrill noise of triumph as the spinning blade sawed through hide and muscle, vertebrae and nerve-trunk. The louder and more distant roar from the thousand cities of mankind, echoing from the distant balconies miles above me and miles away, told me the blow that I could not see had struck home, and that victory was mine.

The monster fell down with me still pinned in his arms.

Somehow, he was still alive. A weird vitality clung to his frame. The arms like iron pinioned me, and only my armor saved me. The face was pressed to mine, and he gnawed on the cheek-plates of my helmet, trying to bite the flesh of my face. His canines were like daggers of bone, and a-drip with warm slobber.

"Why do you hate us?" I whispered aloud, gasping. "Why do you attack us?"

The abhuman grinned at that, and his eyes glinted like black stones, and his beast mask was transformed as the abhuman died, and the possessing force came fully to the fore: it was no longer a him, but an it.

Now the face of it was something wholly opposite a man, something antithetical to all life.

"Malice is its own reason," The words from the mouth were in an ancient language. "Malice invents its own excuses. The Great Ones could have smashed your flimsy metal house long and long ago, child of man, but it is degradation they crave: death is too noble. For centuries they will torment your dead, until even your memories are a torment. I am made in mockery of you, me and all my race, a crooked copy, merely so that you can be told this final secret: there is nothing."

"What have we ever done? Did our ancestors open up a gate into an ulterior dimension and release this horror? What is the reason?"

It laughed without breath. "No reason. There is nothing. You are to die. You scream in the night. The silence will not answer you."

By that time, I had worked a hand free, found again my dirk, and, straining, brought the point up to the soft flesh beneath its chin. Because my arm was pinned so tightly against its monster chest I could not push the dirk quickly, therefore I applied pressure until the point slowly penetrated its chin and tongue and mouth, the roof of its mouth and skull, and finally the blade found its brain, and the metal pulsed with light, radiance entered its brain pan, and it died fully and completely.

I had to saw myself free of the monster's grip with the spinning blade of my Diskos.

Then, my blade still, utter darkness fell over the scene again; and I crawled away from the combat, moving on three limbs like an abhuman, one hand on the ground. My other hand held my Diskos, and I used it like an old man’s staff to support my steps.

What was it? The noise of many voices from the Last Redoubt was gone. It was as if all mankind held its breath. There was some danger near me, something the Monstruwacans did not dare to signal to me through the flashing lamps of the upper stories, lest their signal make my foes rush in.

I listened. Slithering noises of pebbles dropping was the only warning I had that the company of abhumans were scaling the cliffs behind me. Perhaps they were already here.

As silently as a man in armor can move, I fled.