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CHAPTER 23

SCRAMBLE IN THE DARK


We had turned our backs on the pantheon and the chaos in it, and escaped—if only for a short time—the Cielcin net. We had to find Gaizka, and Kybalion most of all. The homunculus had our weapons, our shields, our terminals. I had seen it strap our belts about its waist.

The torn hem of a red cloak vanished around a corner ahead and to our right, and I gave a shout. The Vaiartu friezes on every wall seemed to dance as we passed. I rounded the corner, and only then realized my mistake.

The knife-missile hissed toward me, launched by the dart-thrower in Kybalion’s sleeve, fast as any arrow. Blind luck and palatine reflex alone saved me, and I raised the Cielcin scimitar to bat the blade aside. The knife-missile skittered into a pillar at my left. It tumbled through the air and—righting itself—thrust at me again.

“Cassandra, stay back!”

This time I was ready, and opening my vision I caught the knife in my fist as I had the one in Oberlin’s chambers. The blade shivered in my hand, and I felt the edge cut. It was not so neat a job as I had managed aboard the Rhea, and I prayed the edge was not poisoned. Still, I held it fast. Lacking highmatter, I pinned the knife-missile to the wall and hammered on it with the lion pommel of my sword. Components sparked, and I let the thing fall dead.

My own blood smeared the inscribed wall, but I had no time to think about the arsenic that had surely entered my body. The Watcher was free, had drunk of the blood and heat of Muzugara and its men and so strengthened itself. I wondered at that—and wondered why Miudanar had not been stirred to new life by the sacrifices offered at the ruin of its skull.

But those, too, were questions for another time.

A second knife-missile hissed toward me. I leaped aside, pressed my back to the nearest pillar, eyes wide as the knife swiveled to find me. How I longed for Valka then! She might have bent her will upon the knives and upon the creature who controlled them, and battled for command.

As it was, I had Cassandra, and we were alone, unshielded, with only the one, dead blade between us.

The knife flew.

As I had with the bullet from Bastien’s Durand’s gun, I permitted the blade to pass through me, to find that place in the weft of time where it missed. I heard the point crunch against the Enari stone, and leaned forward so that the blade and my head no longer occupied the same point in space.

“Rúhé?” Kybalion’s fury tinged each syllable of his disbelief.

How?

The earth shook, shaken by the Cielcin moon above or by the dark god awakened in the pantheon below. The chameleon stumbled, and vile dust fell from the stones above our heads. A glowsphere drifted up the hall between us, obediently following its programmed track. Looking back, I saw Cassandra standing behind one of the pillars across the broad hall. There was a space between the columns and the outer wall to either side, shadowy colonnades illuminated only by phosphorescent tape placed there by Valeriev’s men.

Our eyes met, and I knew she meant to try and flank the homunculus.

I shook my head.

She shook hers in turn.

Throwing all caution to the wind, I sprinted up the corridor, straight at the painted man.

Kybalion raised its dart-thrower to launch another knife-missile, but nothing came. A faint, mechanical clicking rebounded off the ceiling of that low, broad hall. Panic filled Kybalion’s eyes, and it fumbled with its unfamiliar belts, scrabbling for one of the highmatter swords. It drew one—one of Cassandra’s, I think—but before it could kindle the blade, Cassandra herself hurtled out of the dark to Kybalion’s right. Her gambit had paid off, and her Jaddian-designed thews had carried her faster even than I.

The both of them went down, Cassandra on top, and I drew up short, watching in mingled surprise and horror to see my daughter seize the painted man by its lapels and slam its head against the stone floor. Cassandra contorted herself to put one heel upon the hand that held the weapon, pinning it as she had pinned many a Jaddian neophyte to the mat. She raised a fist.

“Please! No!” The painted man let the sword go, tried to move its hands to cover its face.

Cassandra struck it anyway, and the crack of her fist was like a hammer blow. “You killed them!” she cried, and hit Kybalion again. “You cut the power! You called them here!”

Dimly, I was aware that I was only standing there, that I was about to watch my daughter kill a man for her first time. I found myself recalling the poor woman I’d stabbed in the shop I’d robbed with Rells’s gang in Borosevo.

I could still remember her eyes, wide and white as those of the homunculus.

“Stop! I yield!”

“Cassandra!” I hauled her off the murderous creature. “Stand aside!”

“But, Abba!” Her chest was heaving.

“Stand aside, I said!” I stood over Kybalion.

The painted man was laughing. “My master . . . ” it said, “will escape.” Red blood covered its face and the front of Lascaris’s gray coat.

“Small matter,” I said, though it was not. I stooped and took up the sword Kybalion had tried to draw to defend itself. It was one of Cassandra’s, silver fittings and red leather, with the Jaddian teardrop pommel. “The Cielcin have failed here.”

“Failed?” Kybalion’s voice cracked, turning from tenor to baritone. “Failed? No, no, gentle lord. Say not failed! The entity is awake!”

“But it cannot leave this planet,” I said, adjusting my grip on the sword. “Isn’t that right? It can’t pass the ionosphere.”

“It will find a way!” Kybalion said. “And when it does, it will awaken the rest of its kind. We might have contained it! Brought it to him. But now . . . now it will be free. And your Empire . . . all you miserable humans will die!” As it spoke, Kybalion’s white hair was changing, darkening from root to tip. Turning black. The round, flat face was sharpening, cheekbones growing more pronounced.

“Your masters will die, too!”

“Good!” Kybalion said. “They made me! And I did not ask to be made!”

I knew the face the beast was taking, as I knew the voice too well. I let it talk.

“I’m like them,” it said in that familiar baritone. “I am the spirit that negates! They will negate everything. You know what they are.”

“I do,” I said to my own reflection, its nose still broken.

“Abba, he’s—!” Cassandra’s voice intruded.

“Cassandra, look away!” I held her sword, kindled the blade.

“They are entropy itself,” Kybalion said. “Who can say how many universes they have rotted and consumed?”

Only one knows that answer, I reflected. And he is Quiet.

“Kill me!” Kybalion roared, and my own voice it parroted, the accent of Delos polished by centuries of Imperial court service and life on Jadd. “Kill me! Cut off your own head. Let’s see if it grows back!”

It laughed again, and it was my own rough laughter that filled the hall. Or nearly so.

The creature at my feet had turned into a bloody imitation of myself. I had become, in a sense, the vision I had seen in the Howling Dark. My future self standing above my battered shadow. Kybalion had quoted Goethe. The spirit that negates. The character he quoted was Mephistopheles.

A devil.

I swung the sword.

Cassandra let out a cry that she strangled and choked off.

In death, the muscles by whose subtle action Kybalion changed the structure of its face relaxed, and Hadrian Marlowe’s death mask softened, became the round, flat face of the demon yet again. But the eyes remained violet, the hair black. I stooped and unbuckled Cassandra’s belt and tossed it to her. Numb fingered, she hardly caught it. “We need to move,” I said.

She did not.

“Cassandra!” I caught her wrist. Her eyes touched mine, that green I’d never known was there.

I proffered her sword, pommel first.

Slowly, not speaking, she belted herself and took the weapon in trembling fingers.

“When we reach the surface,” I began, “we must find Gaston. And we must arm the Perseus weapon.”

“The what?”

“The Empire built a weapon that can kill the Watcher,” I said, and crouching collected my own belt, began picking through the dead changeling’s pockets to find my wrist-terminal. I found it in a breast pocket, and slid it back over my wrist.

The sound of feet and rough voices came from the hall behind, and looking back I saw the horned shadows of pursuers dancing on the walls. “Go now!” I said, moving just behind. “Shields up, girl! Double quick!”

She sped ahead of me, shield flickering to life. I followed more slowly, wrapping the belt into place beneath my dusty coat and pausing to check the drape of my sword’s holster.

“Qita! Qita!” came the inhuman voices.

I took them as spurs myself, and redoubled my efforts, chasing after Cassandra. My bad knee complained violently, but I gave it no hearing, and clenched my teeth. Ahead and to the left, there was a stair that would take us to an upper level, and into a basilica-style hall. From there, we had several levels of switchback stairs to reach the level of the hypostyle and the main gates of the city.

As I ran, I keyed my terminal, shouted into it. “Neema! Neema, it’s Hadrian! Neema, can you hear me?”

Even if he could, there was little enough the Jaddian servitor could do.

We’d reached the stairs by then, and Cassandra was climbing. I followed after her, still shouting for Neema, for Albé, for anyone. No answer came, unless it was from the Cielcin coming hard behind.

“Yukajji!” cried one rough voice. “Oreto o-yukajji wo!”

“Uimmaa o-tajarin!”

They had seen me.

We reached the level of the basilica—a broad, high-ceilinged hall with chambers opening to either side—and together we streaked across the vast pavers of its floor. Footsteps rang and rebounded off the brutally angled vaults.

A grinding sound filled the air behind, and whirling, I drew my sword in time to slash the nahute from the air. The Cielcin who had thrown it leaped like an ape through the door I had so recently passed, and like an ape it rushed toward me, scrabbling on hands and feet. The sight of the highmatter gave it pause, and it drew back, fangs bared as its brothers surged in after it.

There were a dozen at least, and many held crooked swords white as milk and gleaming in the dim light. I recognized the one called Shahaga among them, a bow-legged beast with three long braids sprouting from the back of its skull.

Of Captain Ramanthanu I saw no sign.

“Your prince is dead!” I said, brandishing my weapon.

“Rakan Ute Aeta!” Shahaga said. He was no true prince.

Ignoring this, I said, “If you leave now and take ship, you may live.”

“Daratiri ne?” asked another, circling to my right. “Live? What good is living? We have been judged. We are dead!”

“And you will be dead soon!” said Shahaga.

“But not before we’ve had our play!” said one, a lanky beast with arms that reached almost past its knees. It was that one which hurled its nahute first. The snake battered my shield and caromed off it before I could slash it in two. The Cielcin all closed at once. I parried a slash from one—cutting its sword in half—and retreated back toward Cassandra, toward the exit.

Cassandra herself leaped in a moment after. Twin blades shone bright as particle beams in the gloom, and in a flash she swept the legs out from under one of the Pale and thrust clean through its armored heart.

The others thought better of their offensive for a moment, cowering before the three blue blades. Cassandra stood fast beside me, her right hand back and lifted in a hanging guard, her left thrust out. Taking my own blade in both hands, I raised it high, slashed low as the single nahute circled back in renewed assault. So armed and shielded, the two of us might overcome a dozen of the Pale.

But Shahaga unslung its nahute from one hip, and cracked it to life.

The others did the same—those as had them.

“Run!” I bellowed, and turning spurred Cassandra to do likewise. We could not fight a dozen of the Pale and nigh as many nahute altogether. Not even my vision—which is bounded by the sensory inputs of my body—could see me through unscathed.

“Side hall!” I said, and pointed with my sword to a passage opening to the right. “We have to lose them!”

Cassandra and I ducked through the narrow portal and hurried up a sloping hall. It led to a tangle of what might once have been service tunnels. Ahead and to the right were the ruins of what I felt sure were lift shafts. The mechanisms themselves had long since corroded, but the shaft ran all the way to the highest levels of the Mensa. There was no way up to the level of the hypostyle and the gate unless it was by the stairs at the far end of the basilica.

The Cielcin had fallen a bit behind, and we had slashed at least three of their questing serpents to ribbons. Cassandra was just ahead of me, her blades unkindled then for safety.

“Up ahead!” I shouted to her, “Through the door on the left and up the stairs!”

We were close, had circled round and nearly returned to the stairs that would carry us to freedom. Two of the Cielcin were hard behind, their swords scraping on the floor as they loped after us. Cassandra vanished round the corner, as Valka once had vanished on Annica so long ago.

I reached the door myself, and though I should have seen the base of the switchback stair and Cassandra mounting them . . . I saw a long and narrow hall. I froze a moment, shock making me hesitate.

“Cassandra!” I shouted, heard the word echo in eternity.

The Cielcin should have reached me by then, and realizing this, I started, whirling to face them in the hall.

They were gone.

I was alone. Even the earth had ceased its trembling.

Everything was deathly still.

“Another vision!” I said, more a shout than a question.

But there was no pain behind my eyes.

“Cassandra!” I shouted down the hall.

There was no answer.

I looked back the way I had come, and found only a blank wall. I turned to go the other way, to go anywhere save through that narrow passage, knowing what must lie at the end.

But that way, too, was shut.

All light went out, for the glowspheres left by Valeriev and his men had vanished with the proper halls. Desperate then and utterly alone, I found the torchlight setting on my terminal and raised my hand for a lamp.

The new tunnel was still there, long and foreboding.

Limping, sword in hand, I began walking, shouting for Cassandra, calling for Neema and Albé.

Nothing availed.

I was alone.

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After what seemed an hour of groping, half-blind in the dark, I thought I heard a sound in the tunnel ahead.

“Hello?” I called, resting a moment against one of the plascrete pillars that ribbed the hall. I studied the carving in the niche between my pillar and the next. It showed a Vaiartu—Aravte-Teäplu, perhaps—standing atop the smooth orb of a planet.

There was no reply.

I limped on, studying the graven niches as I went. When I had gone perhaps a hundred feet, I saw the same image of the Enar crouched atop its planet, a veritable colossus. There was a crack in the face of that planet, and a chip missing. Had the last relief had the same crack? The same chip?

I could not be going in circles, of that much I was certain. I was walking in a straight line.

I moved on ahead, a little faster then, and saw the same relief, the same crack, the same chip missing.

There came a sound like distant laughter, and I gripped my sword the tighter.

“Who goes there?”

Silence.

“Show yourself!”

I screwed my eyes shut, performed the quick breathing ritual Gibson had taught me as a boy on Delos. Fear is a poison, I murmured.

After a moment I forced myself to start moving, following the wall with my fingers, the way illuminated only by the faint light of my wrist-terminal.

Something fell with a clatter in the hall just behind me, and I turned sharply, conjuring my blade.

There was nothing.

And yet I sensed that I was not alone. There was a presence there, just out of sight, as though someone just behind me had vanished round a corner that was not there.

“Get a hold of yourself, Marlowe,” I said, practicing the scholiast’s breathing ritual once more.

No sooner had those words left my lips than a voice—faint at first and far off—rose from the hall ahead. I turned back to face it, head cocked.

Song.

How long I stood there listening I cannot say. It might have been hours or merely seconds. I felt in that moment that I must have known a horror akin to that which brave Ulysses had felt, tied to the mast of his ship. So beautiful and terrible was that voice, high and clear, that it could not have come from any human throat. There was a resonance to it that put me in mind of some stringed instrument immeasurably vast, or of Sabratha’s vanished whales.

My fingers tightened on my sword.

I knew what awaited me along the passage ahead, knew what creature had bent the paths of Phanamhara before me to ensure I came upon it.

There was a light, dim and pale green. I edged toward it, toward that superhuman voice, conscious of the fact that I could not have stopped my advance if I wanted to. I was chant-caught, spellbound, transported.

The hall ended in a triangular door, tall and narrow. The green light came from within, and the song with it.

I froze upon the threshold.

The pantheon stood before me, its dark galleries rising all round, its walls and graven niches carved with the exploits of the Vaiartu, their battles and conquests. All was as we had left it. The bodies of the dead Cielcin lay strewn all about, many of them in pieces. Black blood smeared the steps to the dais, and the wreck of the palanquin smoldered on the far side. The light came from the glowspheres in the upper galleries. Muzugara’s body had vanished completely in the first fighting, but neither did I see any sign of Ramanthanu.

It should not have been possible. I had left the pantheon behind far below, had never once gone down again. Mounting the steps to the dais, I recalled the hidden chamber in Calagah, how it seemed taller within than without. I had been brought back here, dragged like a fish on a line.

The singing stopped.

“Show yourself!” I shouted once more, looking up and round, expecting to see the shrouded figure standing on one of the upper galleries, lying in wait.

The ruined palanquin sparked, brief radiance casting blue light upon that ancient temple. Something brushed against my arm, and I rounded, teeth bared.

Still, there was nothing.

Abruptly, I realized what a fool I was being. Again I used Gibson’s breathing regimen to calm my nerves, I felt my heartbeat slow, and when I looked up, it was with eyes wide open.

Something flickered at the corners of my vision.

How can I describe it?

Have you ever watched the shadow of a bird stretched vast as a dragon on the earth beneath? Felt it like a cloud overhead one moment—then gone the next? I saw such a shadow then, playing amidst the upper galleries and the distant dome of the ceiling.


Shimtushu elika.


The shadow had fallen on the wreck of the palanquin, was seated upon it as though it were a throne. I turned to face it, sword still in hand. The Watcher—a shapeless figure in black—reclined atop the ruined machine. Though it had no face, no eyes, no features I could mark whatever, I sensed its full attention was on me.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.


Awātumka ahiātum.


Its voice resounding in my head more than in the mighty hall.


Nishūka madish ēwūm-ma . . . wardūshu kunu!


“What do you want?”

The shadow vanished, blew away like dust.

It reappeared on the lip of the gallery above and to my left, looking just as it had in the desert, a figure clothed in black. It paced along the rim of the level above. With one step, I saw the pale foot emerge from beneath the hem of its shroud, discerned the shimmer of gold.


Adīni ul talammādanni?


It sounded like a question.

The shadow had halted on the gallery above, was looking silently down at me. Oberlin had said the creatures were pure force, given form only by the condensation of that force into transient matter. The skull of Miudanar had been only a husk, a shell shed by the Watcher as a locust might discard its bones. The Watchers might take any shape, and yet the figure before me seemed as removed from the skull of that gargantuan serpent as anything could be.

Something moved in the corner of my vision, and turning my head I saw a second figure—twin to the first—standing a quarter turn to the left. There was another to my right, and turning quickly round, I saw I was surrounded.

There were six of them.

I confess I broke in that moment, and bolted for the exit.

Something unseen collided with me, solid as a wall, and I fell back upon the steps of the dais, dazed. Above, I saw the six black figures standing in air, descending toward me as one, their shrouds untouched by any wind. But when they reached the ground there was only one figure remaining, taller than it was before. A towering figure.


Ul ninakkar.


My fall had driven the wind from me, and I lay still like an overturned crab. In that moment, I knew that I would never see my Cassandra again, would never stand beneath the open sky. I was going to die like Muzugara—torn to pieces by the thousand hands of a beast older than our universe.

The Watcher was bending over me, a dozen feet high.

I rolled onto my side.

Something white and slick lashed me across the face, and I sprawled back upon the step once more.

No. I was not going to die on my back like an old man. I was not going to die gasping, pleading on the ground. I looked across the infinite moment, saw a place—far off—where I was at least halfway to my feet. I leaped toward it, felt time collapse around me, and at once I was no longer on my back, breathless and spent.

I was on one knee, rising, sword in hand.

In cutting across time, I had acted faster than thought, faster than light, faster even than that horror Muzugara had summoned up to our world. To an observer in that awful chamber, it must have seemed that I moved in the wink of an eye. In reality, I had not moved at all, only traded one Hadrian for another.

Nothing could have outpaced me as I slammed the point of my sword up into the heart of that beast in black.

I do not know what I expected.

A gout of silver blood? A cry of inhuman pain? Another blow?

Nothing of the sort occurred.

My blade stopped.

I was on my feet by then, and looked down in dumb amazement to see a hand—gold-ringed, six-fingered, pale as Death—grasping the point of my sword. In that moment, I knew the horror and the sheer, holy terror Irshan must have felt in the Grand Colosseum.

No blood shone upon the alien hand, and in that slender arm I sensed the strength to flatten empires.

“What are you?” I asked, hardly knowing what it was I said.

White pain flared behind my eyes, and I felt my knees buckle. The Watcher still held the tip of my sword in its hand. I was kneeling then, kneeling amid a crowd of prostrate creatures, hexapods in suits of silver filigree. The Vaiartu massed about me, swarming about the steps of the dais, clambering over one another in their desperation to be nearer the rim. As I watched, the Vaiartu were lifted one by one into the air and smashed, their bodies—which I realized with horror were as much mechanical as animal—crushed by the Watcher’s unseen hand.

“U Sha Ra!” cried the Vaiartu who prostrated themselves, voices filling the hall of sacrifice. “U Sha Ra! U Sha Ra!”

“Ushara?” I said, and the word broke the vision.

I knelt amid the corpses of the Cielcin, eyes fixed on that impossible hand.

That impossibly human hand.


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