By Pinlighter
In the dark.
He strains to
see. What?
Where? Why is he
here? He is constantly rebuked, continually told to be
silent. He must not speak, he must not speik, above
all.
Hands guide him, fists strike him if he does wrong.
They slither among the
hair-fine bushes, all alert for
something he
cannot understand.
Where? Where?
Stillness.
Now the other men surround
him. A pressure, a
tension,
relaxes.
He awakes.
*****************
Fourteen miles beyond the Quiet City.
Casualties 194.
There is a dull loom of light from behind and
above. Ahead, there
is nothing but blackness. The host moves slowly in the grey dark,
without either climbing or descending very much, blindly following
their Helm indicators north.
The land slopes up gradually
and to the right and by the testimony of foot and knee and gauntleted
hand scrabbling in the dark it seems to be a kind of stepped plateau
covered with overlaid fans of rock scree, but it is impossible to see
well enough to be sure of this.
There are stops and changes of path but they rarely have
to
backtrack. Whenever they must pause they sit or squat, silent and
patient, resting without question.
He is half way Out, along one spine of the five-ply
formation that they
keep to even in this dark. Tomorrow he will be further
Out. He can feel where he is within that body
of moving men as surely as he could feel the place of a finger tracing
over his flesh.
They walk. They scramble over rocks as rough as
uncreated shards
of night. They fall, rise, and continue, and after a time defined
by no clock, they stop. There is no order given or speech
exchanged, but each man knows what he must do. The outguards take
the pattern infinite star,
and behind them the five falcions are set
up, silently rendering stones to smoothness in their guts.
There is time for sleep. There is no search
for shelter, no
huddling. They do not speak to each other even now. They
squat and lie where they are, wrapped in their black cloaks puffed with
inert gas. There is no room for fear. Too sharp
an attention is necessary for even fear to find room in their
hearts. And yet they sleep.
*****************
They are awake again, Out here, where there is neither
sleep-time nor
wake-time ever. The darkness within each head opens, and looks
forth, and finds only darkness in the universe around it.
There has been no attack while they slept, but the men
at the five tips
of the star must be drawn back in to the body of the host, while others
walk Out. And so it is performed. The process is not spoken
of, it is all done without speaking. Nobody speaks here, nobody
communicates except to indicate action and direction by quiet fast
downturned movements of the hands as they exchange places. Nobody
shows their face for even a second or allows their unprotected heads to
be exposed to the Night. All goes smoothly.
But, as the falcions are being dismounted, there is an
alert. A
gunner swivels to track a nearby moving blackness, and instantly they
all fall into a crystalline pattern, freeing his field of fire and
supporting him. Other spots of motion are sketched in by
the Helm imaging systems and the two flanking falcions limber up,
exposing short barrels. They scan the darkness around them, and
now the movements become undeniable, Out there in the dark.
Something is coming, something is moving from the Night. Fourteen
things advance, overlapping black curves of muscle and limbs, moving
with a slow rolling grace, slow, then whip-fast over the last twenty
fathoms. A frantic glee fills him, and he runs forward, but the
falcions spit bolts of stone through the attackers and the other men
rush to meet them, wrapped in coils of black as they join but lopping
and slicing themselves easily free. The Beasts are dead or fled
before he can strike.
Only three of the things return to the cover of the
darkness. Nothing from them, not so much as a
touch.
*****************
Their nightsuits are not the heavy amplified coverings
used by the
Watchmen for patrols or close exploration work. They are as thin
as cloth and as light as paper, unamplified and uninstrumented.
Their only augmentation is in the complex filters in the Helms, which
make up thirty percent of the suits' weight and consume all their
power. Long ago, men could survive in the Land by relying only on
their own senses. Now they must wear the Helms, which mount
shields and sensory enhancements on a pattern two million years
old. The Helms capture and amplify sound, and scavenge what
little light there is in the Night Land. They map the paths
through the dark, and they pass messages to other men in ways that
hopefully are not obvious to the entities of the Land, where even
telepathy is too risky to be used. They enhance and they
communicate and they also protect, for they shield the eyes as well as
the Soul from that which can destroy merely by being
sensed.
If he stands high and free in the Land he can see
lacunae where the
Helm's shielding intervenes, blinding his eyes because to see the
things there would kill. It is Forbidden to look
back, but he has seen. There are six great gaps in the view
of the Land, in the sensorium of the Helm, where the things too
terrible to be viewed must exist, for the Helm does not permit him to
see any thing there.
*****************
Another day of darkness passes. They move
slowly. They span across the Land like the nodes in a
crystal, just far enough apart from each other that they can not touch
each other with the Dyskos and no further, like a flexible
crystal. It is all barren here, without vegetation, without
structures, without light sources, and seemingly almost without life,
yet from time to time something is detected Out in the dark and they
stop or change course. They avoid conflict if they
can. There are no more attacks, not
today.
It will be his turn to be an outguard soon, and to
patrol near one tip
of the star. He anticipates this with a dull anxiety. It is
the pattern of time here: the periods of greater stress and
danger when he is further Out, and the times of lesser threat when he
is within, are all that marks the passage of the days. But it is
not yet his part to walk Out and guard the others. That will come in a
few days.
This alternation of greater and lesser fear is the
skeleton on which
memories are strung. Though the cycles of the past blur together
he knows they go from one place to another. They are going
to somewhere. They came from somewhere. He can remember the
early days of the journey, when there was more light, and there were
more attacks than there are now, and the host was more
numerous. There were hordes of things that looked like men,
some of them much bigger than men, and they fought them again and again
and ran for hours in terrible exhaustion but in disciplined ranks
without panic, fighting as they ran. And there were
much larger creatures that threatened them, vast and terrible, each one
unique. Almost the earliest thing he remembers is a gush of
violet fire that smote down from somewhere behind them and consumed one
of these monstrous attackers. But he did not look back.
What happened before that? Where was he,
where were they
all, before that?
Is this all of existence? To cross a land
full of
Nightmare, a dark land?
He can remember nothing before this. This is
life.
*****************
Some of the men are different. There are two kinds
of men in the
host, and one kind is shorter and wider-hipped and a little awkward,
and is allowed to stay in the centre of the host, where it is safer,
carrying burdens. This is obviously the right way to treat
them.
*****************
Clouds of glittering light sweep by them, shedding no
light on the Land
or on any thing but themselves. They stand absolutely still
as the clouds approach. No-one moves. Something
inside him knows these things are deadly dangerous and his Helm is
screeching warning and despair, but he does not move or
think. He does not react. He does not think.
The Lights pass on, undeviating.
*****************
Another sleep, another waking. They move on
through the
Dark.
Another alert passes from the right flank
outguards. Something is
near. A group of entities is near, is
approaching. There are hints of sub-ulfire moving in the
far distance, ducking behind rocks, the glow of heat that a man might
show if he foolishly opened his mouth: and there are sounds in the
Silence, that might be communication. The outguards have
taken posture of alert, and their knowledge travels through the host.
He is in the second or third rank. He can not yet
see the
intruders, but he is obedient to instruction and the common intent of
the host. He waits patiently until he sees pale entities,
bipedal, mere Helm traces in the long wavelengths, advance from the
cover of nearby rocks: and then he shifts smoothly into attack
stance.
The things come closer and closer. They are
human in
size. This is not like the other attacks ((his Helm automatically
scans the eight steradian solid angle above around and behind him and
checks, no motion, no life, no pneuma traces except his comrades: only
these small, few, things ahead of him)) and they keep coming, visible
to the unenhanced eye in the gleamings of deep ulfire and distant
unearthly blue from behind them. The things keep coming forward,
and then stop. They gather together. And one comes
forward alone.
Its head is huge and distorted, and he sees suddenly
that it is wearing
a head-covering, a jug, a Helm, and that it moves in a way that is like
a human being, and it holds a broken discoid club from which motes of
light drift. Which it puts down. And it opens its
hands. And it speaks, thin choked sounds with a strange
rhythm.
He sees no more because there is an abrupt surging
forward of the
flanks ahead of him, and the figure falls, cut apart, with a dreadful
weak cry; and the other strange figures scatter.
There is a pause. Then they move on.
But as they move
on past the site of the encounter he is able to glance down, and sees
the Helm has been knocked off, and in the distant shinings the figure
lying broken on the rocks has a starved skull-like face with a white
beard, and long pale hair, and the face is not the face of a monster.
*****************
Why am I here?
I must endure.
But I cannot, I cannot
remember.
I cannot . . . .
*****************
From time to time he does things that he knows are
wrong.
The suit and weapons, the dyskos and the Helm, are like
parts of his
body. The dyskos stores power from the same trickle of energy
that feeds his Helm, led from generators in his heels through his
armour. Its grip is textured to his hand and loops round the
smallest finger: its shaft is not straight but is very slightly
curved from an offset and angled and grooved and tapered section which
fits his palm and thumb as the joints of his bones fit and requires no
effort to hold for hours. It is hard to imagine that
he was ever separate from this perfect weapon.
But sometimes . . he finds himself
activating it.
When there is no need. It has only three settings, on, off and
high, and he finds himself activating it and then turning
it off,
activating it and then turning it off, wasting power, for no reason,
when there is nothing near.
Reset/ Reset/ Reset/
This comforts him a little.
He keeps wanting to look back, but he knows that is
Forbidden. There must be no thought of going back.
*****************
The Lights come again, and again they freeze where they
stand,
unthinking and unmoving. But this time instead of sweeping
past without hesitation the swirling beautiful sparkles slow and change
course. They swarm towards the host, at first just a few, then in
masses. They are arrayed in many distinct spindles, twirling
slowly on a vertical axis. Their size and their distance
cannot be judged well because the each constellation expands and
contracts wildly and the individual sparks within it are mere points
without dimension, but they are coming closer and closer.
Something like fear invades his thrice-burned mind as they approach,
but there is no possible place to flee, and he must stand still.
The Lights are closer than they have ever
been. The
information in his Helm displays reaches a crescendo of urgency.
The symbols before his eyes shape EIHWAZ
and then EIHWAZ MERKSTAVE and
he knows that it is an instruction to take an ultimate retreat, but he
cannot retreat, for a reflex or pattern he would have followed is
somehow not functioning. Part of him tries to panic, but that too
is intercepted by the same imperative force that keeps him standing
still, and deep within him he feels some process start. It
is not from the Lights. It is from within, a response or
defence. He feels as though he is being simplified, reduced,
disguised as something less than he is, as inside him some thing
gathers.
The Lights come yet closer, and the tension builds
inside him, not fear
but a tension he cannot interpret. It builds and builds to a
bursting point and then something soft opens and a sudden flood of
sweetness smothers him, a feeling that is so disconnected from the
environment around him that for an instant he is more frightened of it
than the Lights. But in seconds, he is lost inside
himself. He remembers another place than this. He remembers
a place as soft as his own flesh. He remembers warmth, and sounds
that were not screams in darkness or the clack of falling
rock. He remembers a face more beautiful than any thing he
knew could exist and he strains to remember more. His flesh
prickles and his eyes tear, his throat is thick, and inside his armour
he is painfully and uselessly erect.
Terrible things are happening near him, his neighbour is
dancing and
jerking as the lights sweep through the man's armour as if it did not
exist and concentrate in a ravenous vortex along the axis of his spine:
but he can only think of that sweetness and that beautiful, beautiful,
face. The blizzard of lights leaves its first victim and flickers
round him, but they do not seem to perceive him or to be able to reach
him, and when the lights pass on leaving the Eaten dead he is still
thinking only of that memory or dream, still trying to remember he
knows not what, still thinking of that beauty.
There are fifty-two victims. He understands that
they have
suffered some form of attack but there is no grief and no sorrow among
them. Each dead man is become unreal, is no more in the Darkness
than another tangle of rock. They have become part of the
Night. They scavenge food tablets and power capsules from
the bodies and leave them.
The sleep-time comes, and they stop, and soon he falls
from
consciousness into the inner night. And yet in his heart there is
now something other than darkness. Something wonderful has happened to
him: there is the memory of the vision, the sweetness. He cannot
achieve the true vision again, but he clings to the memory, and holds
it near to his heart. He hopes to dream, but dreams do not
visit him in the Night; and when he wakes he finds he is hoping the
Lights will return.
*****************
The next day he is outguard. It is his turn to be
near one tip of
the shrinking, tattered, star, and he finds he is in the rear, in the
backward-pointing arm, the last of the host. He is not
quite the very last of all; there is one that walks beside him, and
there is one that walks behind them both, but he knows this is
the position where people die. Their numbers are
growing fewer. They started with Five hundreds. He
knows what that means. And now barely half are left.
They move on through the night. It is his
duty to scan
every where. Every fifteen paces he turns a complete circle,
scanning the Night, to alternate sides: he is graceful and powerful
even in his armour, you would think he was dancing. The extra
effort rouses him to a higher level of physical awareness and he feels
the weight of the nightsuit, the prickle of his skin, the places where
it chafes a little, but he puts those sensations aside. His Helm
scans at high alert, concentrating on the landscape traces behind him,
partly masked by the one man at the very rearmost tip of the
star. There are movement traces. There are low-level
animal traces from insects and arthropods. There are the slow
pulses of geovore stromata here and there, but these are no threat if
they are avoided. There are larger and more active
entities, far back: He concludes they must be gathered round the dead,
feasting, and sonic amplification brings him some hint of a combat that
must be desperate.
There is a little more light here, occasional streaks of
bioluminescent
jale under rocks, and sparkles of volcanic flares from some deep
source, but this means more danger.
Far behind it all in the Night are the many disparate
sources of light
that indicate the lowlands they came from. In the centre is the
single great gap his Helm imposes on that distant landscape. And
sometimes when they crest over some low ridge he sees the five lesser
voids round it. He strives to avoid being aware of all this.
*****************
The Land seems even more barren here, though there is
more light in
this region of low volcanic flares. But they really are being
followed. Once more he sees things that might be the bipeds who
approached two days ago. There are barely a handful of these
entities and they move as silent as ghosts, ducking behind rocks and
crawling, but the Helm systems detect living warmth as well as light
and their heat traces cannot be hidden. He ponders whether to
give an alert, but the threat does not rise far enough above noise
level to move him to action. A low pulse of warning nonetheless
seeps across to him and his mate from the very last man, and they both
fall back to support him, staring across the dark. But it
proceeds no further than that. The intruders seem content to
follow them without attack and the host is not delayed in its slow
crawl through the Night.
But then there is a stop, a dead stop. He
continues to scan the
Land behind them but by the movement of the men in the host and by the
messages communicated without words it slowly becomes known that they
can not go on. There is some thing ahead of them. The
Helm indicators point north
and in mindless obedience to that they
would all continue, but the obstacle, whatever it is, lies square
across their path and they must turn left or right. The
host has no central brain that will make the decision and no captain,
only an unspoken relayed cybernetic consensus, but now the consensus
does not form. The Helms keep urging them north. They wait,
and they wait, but a clear common intent does not form, and their unity
is broken. Each man tries to follow his inbuilt instructor and
finds that his neighbour has not made compliant action. It
almost seems that this body of men that has fought past giants and
monsters and pneumavores may be destroyed by this simple thing, for for
the first time there is dissension among them.
He waits, counselling himself to patience and scanning
the Night, but
there are more reasonless flashes of ulfire and red light from ahead,
volcanic flares, and at last he forgets his duty and forgets his
place and turns to stare ahead to try and understand the delay: and
swiftly turning back with a start he realises he and his mates have
been crept up upon. One of the strange bipeds is close, is
no more than ten paces back. He signals alarm and moves to attack
it, and his companions and the whole body of men spring once more into
harmony. They surge towards the intruder and it is suddenly very
close to him. There are flashes of red light again, and one
shines upon it clearly, shines brightly upon it, before it turns and
flees back into the shelter of the rocks.
*****************
Eventually they turn left, downhill, west. He
follows in his
proper place. To his right is the obstacle that stopped them: a
slow glacier of dull ulfire coals, scabbed with black and veined with
liquid red, flowing from some new-opened vent of the Land's
volcanic forces, unmapped and uncrossable. But he keeps looking
behind him, and now it is not mere duty that prompts him.
The figure coming out of the dark into the sudden clear light was
different and significant somehow. The Helm systems
categorised it unambiguously as abhuman
but it was different. Those few
instants replay themselves in his memory as he tries again and again to
see it more clearly. The heat traces in the Land are now
masked by the glow of the lava river, which is brilliant in the
sub-ulfire wavelengths, and he can not easily detect any tracking
lifeforms following, but he keeps looking. Again and again, he
revisits his memory of that sight.
*****************
That sleep-time he strives to remember the beauty that
visited him when
the Lights came, but now that thought is mixed with something
else. There is a new thing he has seen, and that he cannot
forget, though he cannot understand why, and deep in his sleep he is
visited by dream, for the first time ever in his memory of this life
In his dream he is somewhere different. He is in a
place where it
is not dark, or a place where the texture of darkness is different from
the Land. It is dim but there is no fear in the dark. It is
dim not because it is a place of horror but because it is a place of
holy kindness. It is a cave, it is an enclosure, it is a house,
and inside it is smoothed by human hand, and he is there in the
innermost part of it where it secret within secret.
There is someone with him, veiled and swathed in dark
clothes.
She has drawn him here and now she is alone in the secret inner place
with him.
She lies down, between him and the wall. But her
face is veiled
and swathed in blackness.
*****************
When they wake once more it is his time to be
Out. Today he
will be the very last of the host, and this sleep-time he will be alone
to watch with a few others while the rest sleep under his guard.
If he survives he will once more be safe, deep within the crowd of
other men for a time.
He moves to his place not thinking of his increased
danger.
Thinking of his dream, which still fills his mind and seems more real
than the Land. Yet only fragments remain, impressions,
intentions, summations without detail. He can not explain to
himself what happened in the dream, and as he strives to fix it in his
memory it fades. Then, guiltily, he turns to his duty, and
they begin.
They are walking downhill quite steeply now. This
is bad.
The lowlands are far more dangerous. He remembers that much from
the early days.
They swerve to the right but are stopped again by the
river of lava,
still impassible though cooler.
He is not distracted again. Every fifteen
steps he scans,
to right then to left, and there is nothing following that he can
see. But they move more and more into regions of confused light
and perversely his Helm-extended senses can see less well here, where
there is more background radiation to confuse the heat traces. Yet
nothing seems to be following.
There are occasional clumps of vegetation here,
intermixed with crptid
predators which project barbed whips at anything which touches a
hair. These cannot penetrate their armour but they are prodromic
of what waits in the lower regions. Ahead of them now and to the
left are the dull glares of distant light, and remembering what they
fought and fled when last they were among those mists and fires he
shivers.
Turning again to scan he catches movement and
stares: it is gone.
They move quickly, downhill, and more and more often
small beasts are
seen to flee from them, scuttling from under rocks or bushes.
They pause, some question of the path, and he catches
the movement
again. He freezes in his scan to look more carefully, and
he looks, and looks, and tries to puzzle out the dim hints of shape in
the night, and suddenly the figure he is watching for rises less than
twenty paces away, showing itself quite clearly in the dim glow.
It rises and stares at him. He stares back. It
is not some horror, it is not a beast, it is surely not one of the
abhumans, it seems to be clothed somehow, its face is . . . but turning
in sudden fear he finds he is alone in the Night.
He panics and starts to run, running directly forward,
and in seconds
he almost crashes in to the flank of the star. He is far
from where he should be, and the Helms of the rear rank turn to track
him all together as he returns to his place, as if he was another thing
coming from the Land.
They continue, continue until it is time to stop.
He looks and
searches the Night behind them again and again, but no one is following
that he can see.
*****************
The time of sleep comes and they stop, and stopping they
rest, but this
sleep-time he must not rest. It will be his part to stay awake
and guard. And very quickly then he is alone, at the rear of the
host, looking out while the others sleep.
Seven paces behind him the black mouth of a falcion,
once more
assembled from the loads carried by seven men, weaves and darts looking
for intruders. The other four outguards stare into the Night from
their places at the other points of the star, far from him. The
men sleep in rows, almost touching each other. They all
sleep. He feels utterly alone.
All through the sleep-time he watches. He
expects to see
the strange figure again, it seems a rule that it must happen, and yet
he sees nothing. There is neither true sleep-time nor
wake-time here, neither light nor utter utter dark, neither comfort nor
fear (for fear requires that there be somewhere to flee, and there is
nowhere to flee, Out here in the Night Land), only the endless threat
and the endless watch without duration. His armour is locked and
he stands at tripod with the dyskos balancing him. His Helm is at
full power. He scans near and far, then near again; opens the
sonic amplification to maximum, hearing the distant rattle of crabs
under the thunder of his breath, and then dwindles it down to normal:
checks for heat in the sub-ulfire (still washed out with the glare from
the North, but less bad now, to-morrow they may try to turn north
again) and then looks for the twining jale of alien pneuma
traces. Nothing. Nothing.
But his mind starts to drift off, remembering ...
what?
Not the dream nor the vision of beauty nor the figure
from the Land,
but something else again. A memory ticks at the edge of his mind.
He stood like this once before, guarding against some thing, with
allies behind him, defeated and retreating. But he was not in the
Land. He did not hold a weapon. Others surrounded
them, but those others were human, and they were not fighting as they
fight beasts with weapons but fighting in some other way. And
they lost the fight, the fight fought without weapons. They
lost, and were doomed to . . .
He tries again to remember, and the memory
flees. He
watches all through the sleep-time, trying to remember, trying to see,
but there is nothing else.
The time of waking comes at last, without light or
change. Why
does it disappoint him that nothing came from the Night?
Why is it with a heavy heart that he turns to move into the centre of
the host and comparative safety? The falcion behind him is
being taken down, and as he turns to help he thinks that perhaps, just
perhaps, he has seen something Out there. He knows he must
not show alarm. He continues to turn away and he walks to the
safer place without looking back. Yet as he turns, his hand,
moving by itself, has taken three food tablets from his pack and is
dropping them at his feet: and his boot, as he pirouettes, shifts cold
gravel half over them so no-one will see them. He cannot
explain even to himself why he does this.
*****************
He is safe, he may rest from being alert, but it comes
to him how their
numbers have dwindled, and how little safety there is here, and how
soon he will be Out again. For the first time he looks
forward to the future, and sees a vista of days and of cycles that beat
ever more quickly until he is alone and always Out in the night without
a single companion. A little terrible wailing starts up in his
heart, and slowly dies.
He plods on, not thinking of the future. There are
enough threats
in the present. They are trying to turn north again, but obstacle
after obstacle hinders them, here on the fringes of the dangerous
lowlands. From time to time organised bands of creatures are
being seen at the extreme limits of the Helm sensoria and he fears that
some sort of cooperative attack may be pending. Also, the
Land here is marked with clumps of vegetation and even with ruined
structures, which they avoid scrupulously, keeping at least five
hundred fathoms from any thing that looks as if it was once built by
hands human or other. They pass through an area dotted with
these ancient ruins, low twisted things that seem to have been melted
and regrown from the ground, connected to each other by a sparse net of
black fibres. Some of the buildings have electromagnetic traces
that may be of defence and detection systems: his Helm sketches an
overlay analysis of this doorway or that stubby turret and he hears
digital calls on the radio bands. In other places drifting
motes of green light fall in streams from ruined equipment
embedded in or growing from the warped stone, and these buildings they
are especially careful to avoid.
It is only when they see a structure not behaving as
rock or stone
should that they stop. Ahead of them is a dark conical
building at least thirty fathoms tall, showing heavy electromagnetic
activity traces. There is something wrong with it, something very
strange indeed even in this Land, for though it does not seem to be
moving it appears to be coming closer faster than it should by their
walking alone, as if there was something wrong about distance and
perspective in the space near it.
They stop, but the Cone is still close and is somehow
drifting
closer. Perhaps it is an illusion but it seems to be closing
between each glance, as if it is not moving when he looks at it but is
somehow closer every time he looks back from glancing away.
There is instant consensus. They retreat,
and after
retreating for a mile they make a wide detour to the left.
But as they press forward along their new path there is the Cone again,
looming at the limits of detection directly ahead of them.
They try a different path again, and are once more blocked.
In desperation they turn in complete reverse and move back towards the
uplands, but as they move forward something is ahead of them: the Cone,
standing square across their path, seeming to be rooted in the ground
and immovable, its flanks twisted like dark wax.
They stop again, and hesitate in confusion. On a
venture he cuts
out his Helm compass and attempts to re-orient using only landscape
cues. Possibly the Cone or whatever dwells inside it has been
interfering with their Helms, for the information this gives tells him
that he has gotten turned round, that they are running downhill again,
that his compass is awry, the Cone has not moved or has not moved much
but is interfering with their cybernetics to draw them to it; and his
Helm flashes this correction to the others.
They cut right at an obtuse angle and by navigating by
the distant
lights alone they manage to stay on course. The Cone does not
reappear.
Suddenly there is another attack, completely
unexpected. A mass
of weapon-bearing hominids, powerful creatures about twice the mass of
a man, come surging at them from an ambush in the cover of the
rocks. He fights and as always his weapon cleaves his foes like
water, yet stones and clubs rain upon him and he is half stunned before
the first flood of enemies is stemmed. They are badly
formed after their flight and it is minutes before they can make the
pentagon properly and many of them fall. When at last the
attackers have been driven off he dares not number the
dead.
More enemies approach and they flee again, climbing the
path they
descended and undoing all the travel of days. Something dies in
his heart.
*****************
Many are hurt. Seven more men have fallen
out or been lost
to trapping predators in the panic flight (a cry, a fall). There
remain only the parts to assemble one falcion. He is hurt,
his head swimming and thumping and half his Helm systems dead, and now
he sees the Land with dual vision and hearing. His left eye and
ear still have the Helm's augmentation but his right are unenhanced and
he sees the true blackness of the Land through them. And he
is half unprotected. Half of him may be sensed and Eaten.
He is in the right flank as they climb back up into the
Night.
How many are left? Barely a Hundred now. The future closes
down upon him: it will not be long.
They find a comparatively safe place where they can not
be approached
without warning. They rest and he drifts off to a
half-dazed sick sleep. Again, he dreams. He is in a
bright place where he stands and faces one who regards him with a
beautiful face and speaks to him with hate. The remembered words
of rejection come to him, meaningless except for condemnation, and he
wakes up with a start. The brightness of the dream overlays the
blackness of the Land, but their bitterness is the same; for the others
have finished their rest and are moving on and he is being left,
perhaps left for dead. He rushes and staggers to catch up, his
wounded head pounding.
*****************
They stumble upward. He is still on the right
flank. There
is some order remaining. They are badly hurt but they still
hang together. The pursuers have dropped behind.
His right eye seems blind compared to the enhanced data
flooding into
his left, but his right ear, oddly, is picking up occasional sounds
that his left is not hearing. Are they still being
followed? These are not the sounds of pursuit. They
almost seem like the sounds of human speech.
They rest again. There are still an hundred or so,
and there is
still a falcion in working condition, but now the others huddle and
jostle together each trying to be closest to the centre and
safety. But he does not. He is feeling stronger or he
needs to believe he is, and he voluntarily walks the rim, with two or
three others.
*****************
There is something he is watching for, with desperate
hope. And
it comes.
Beside them, showing quite clearly now in ordinary
unenhanced vision,
not far from him, a figure rises and stands in the Night.
He does not attack. The Helm is classifying her
as abhuman but
now his right eye can see her face in the dim red
light of lava flare quite clearly.
She speaks to him, and he hears her through his right
ear, the ear that
is not protected by the machine which filters out the lies and deceits
of the Night. He is hurt and he is unprotected and her
words cannot now be denied. They are too weary to pursue or
attack her and she will not be driven off, and she is speaking to
him.
She is saying: "Take
it off. Take off your
Helm."
*****************
Behind him the others gather like jointed faceless
dolls. Before
him she kneels: a woman, thin, worn, blackened, wearing a
tattered undersuit caked with gods know what filth, but
human. Her uplifted face shows beautiful in the red light.
Her hands gently lift to touch his Helm.
He waits in a horror of unknowingness and hope. Is
this
death? Is she a madness or an illusion from the Land? Or
has she come here from the place of his dreams, and will she take him
back there?
What loss can he suffer? He raises his hands to
his neck,
releases the catches, and lifts off the Helm.
Bareheaded, he knees to match her,
fainting. She
midwives his rebirth. The pneumasomatic blocks are removed with the
Helm, and memory and knowledge erupt in him and stream over
him. He remembers where he is, and what he is, and what he
was dreaming of. He looks into the Night with unprotected human
vision and far away and unfiltered now by any machine he sees the Final
Light shining from the peak of the Redoubt. He looks to his
ancient home and remembers what happened and why he and his people are
here and how they were sent Out.
Tears fill his eyes, but he can not even now look at
Mother Redoubt
with hatred.
*****************
He almost dies. He should have realised that
kneeling like
that, touching what is classed as abhuman and Helmless, he
would himself be seen as a danger or as one fallen to the other
side. Some instinct warns him, a scuff of boot on rock, a
hiss of breath, or the flick of her eyes and the tensing of her
muscles. As she leaps up to flee he is also erect and turning and
his dyskos roars on high as
it defines an arc of blinding light and
flame between him and the advancing warriors. That stops
them for the instant they both need to escape and they are not pursued
far.
Very soon he is alone in the Night, blind but
seeing. And not
truly alone, for She can not be far away.
© pinlighter
4 May 2005
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