CHAPTER 24
QUEEN OF THE DAWN
The Watcher Ushara still held my blade, and though neither of us moved, I felt myself falling. A human hand. A human hand! How could I have been so blind? They had been human hands that tore Muzugara apart, had been human feet I’d seen beneath the hem of that black robe.
But why?
It was a trick. It had to be. The Watchers could take any form.
They were creatures of pure energy. Pure spirit.
I reached through my vision, found a place where my blade was free. I slashed wildly at the demon. The Watcher blinked out of existence, moving fast as I. My blade whistled through empty air. Again I stretched my vision, chose a point where the sword struck true.
Once more, the beast evaded me, twisting across time to escape me.
Only belatedly did I realize what was happening.
I saw an opening in the manifold curtains of time, a place where my blade pierced that black shroud. I moved toward it, collapsing the wave of time, but even as I made the move, I saw the beast turn, and though I was conscious of no face, I felt its vision press on me, and knew it saw me across the blank expanse of time.
It moved as I moved, saw as I saw—chose as I chose.
I staggered as my sword went wide, and a blow struck me across the back.
I hit the pale crystal of the slab face first, braced myself for the end. I expected death to follow me, expected the touch of a thousand violent hands.
Instead, there was nothing.
Sword unkindled in my hand, I made to rise, propped myself on hands and knees. Looking up, I saw an old man in a dusty coat lying against the wreck of one of Muzugara’s chimeric guardians. He rested his head against the chassis of the ruined warrior. White scars tore his left cheek, decorated his hands. He was breathing hard, and red blood soaked his white-streaked dark hair. A woman crouched beside him, naked and paler even than he, her skin the milk-white of alabaster, her hair the very curtains of night.
He was wounded. There was blood sheeting from his side. The two of them held hands so that I could not know for certain which of them it was had wielded the knife. As I watched, the woman took her other hand and pressed something into the man’s side. A splinter of bone it seemed to me, or an arrowhead of pale stone. The man winced, cheeks working like a bellows.
He cried out in pain, and as I watched the blood on his hands ran from red to white to silver.
I cried out in horror.
Only then did he turn to look at me, and I saw that he was myself.
“No!” I pounded the floor with my hand. “No, I won’t!”
The vision faded, and I felt the familiar pain behind my eyes.
Nusuq.
I rocked back upon my haunches.
The shadow stood over me. I looked up at it, and it seemed I saw with doubled vision. With the one eye I saw the shadow, the monster that had destroyed the Cielcin in that very hall. With the other, I saw the same woman, naked and tall. The shadow was only the curtain of her hair, black as the very pits of hell. She smiled down at me, and that smile smote my heart.
Hers was not a human face, but a face as like to human faces as human faces are like the statue of some heroic ideal. Or rather, ours were like unto hers—for she was the ideal of ideals. A beauty beyond description, peerless in every way. Her skin glowed like sunlit snow, her hair—curling—dark as evening. Her every cord and sinew was perfectly defined, her body like velvet over steel. Golden bands embraced her slender arms, her wrists, her ankles, and rings shone upon her six-fingered hands. And her eyes!
I was drowned in them. In wells of sorrow blacker than any night.
Though I felt my knees firm upon the floor of the pantheon, I hurtled through limitless space, through clear air, and below me I beheld a world of storm-tossed green water. The spires and ramparts of a city rose like teeth from the maw of the sea, and with a start I recognized the avenues and jagged towers of Phanamhara. Only the topmost elements of what would become the Mount of Whales rose from the surface, and as I watched a vessel like a great, spoked wheel unmoored from the top of the highest tower. Without needing to be told, I knew it was the last ship to depart Sabratha before the end. It floated into the sky, rotated, and disappeared. It had not leaped to warp, but it had vanished.
The sun streaked overhead, vanishing as Sabratha turned to hide her face. The waves rolled, and crashed, and the sun came out once more. It streaked across the sky with ever-increasing speed, until the passing of each day was less than the blinking of my eyes. Once, I saw the brief shape of a leviathan leap from the tops of the alien waves. Centuries passed in instants. Millennia. More. I beheld the city of Phanamhara as it rose from the sea, saw its tallest towers crumble, the great towers where once the vast, wheeled ships of the Enar had moored. Only gradually did I realize that the city was not rising.
The waters were running dry.
Then they were gone, and the long eons and the desert winds and the hurricanes reduced the city to rubble, to a shadow of its former terror and splendor. The sands massed about it, and the last of Sabratha’s rains turned that sand to earth, and more sands piled on after, until all was lost.
And I was alone on a dead world.
I—who had been a god to the creatures of that world, who once had drunk of the very stars—was forced to hunt the scant survivors of the vanished seas, and break their forms for heat. I—who had feasted on the bones and smoke of sacrifice in the temple they had built for me—had been reduced to little more than a scavenger. When at last the ions that bounded the upper airs were stripped away, and I might have slipped Sabratha’s circles, I had not the strength to fly. Instead I slept, haunting the temple that had become my tomb.
The vision faded.
I was kneeling in the pantheon again, the woman standing over me, silent as before.
There were tears on my cheeks.
Her tears.
The visions I had seen, of titanic beasts and horrors beyond description, of many-armed and tentacled things, of wings time-eaten and vast beating against the wind of stars . . . these I had been prepared for. I had expected monstrosity. I had expected things wholly outside human comprehension.
I had not expected this. Had not expected to feel as they felt—had not expected them to feel as we, and more! For it seemed to me the great extremes of human passion, the highest joys, the deepest sorrows, were as anthills and pockmarks measured against the mountains and ravines I glimpsed when the Watcher’s mind had touched my own.
“You’re trapped here,” I said. “Am I supposed to pity you?” Haltingly, I found my feet, raised my chin. “Why did you kill the Cielcin? They wanted to take you away.”
The woman turned her head, her curtain of hair falling like a shadow—like a shroud—between us.
“What are you?” I asked, clenching my fist about the hilt of my unkindled sword. “The mural. In the hypostyle. The Enar painted you with human eyes!”
One red-rimmed eye peered out at me from that curtain of black hair.
Lights brighter than the brightest sun flared across my memory. Lights and that beautiful, inhuman music. I was falling, falling at terrible speed, falling into the hot black of space. There were no stars.
Ina sippirāti sha dāriātim annepish.
The woman advanced toward me, bare feet silent on the blood-streaked stone. I watched myself clamber up the ramp to the surface, clutching my wounded side. Cassandra greeted me, and the Irchtani carried us beyond the wreck of the battlefield. Ships found us, carried us to the stars. I saw myself seated on the Solar Throne, and in the place of Selene there sat a black queen. Ushara herself. Across the galaxy, the red sun of the old Emperors was setting, and in its place black banners arose, and the star that fluttered upon their fields had five points, not twelve.
My star.
A new Empire. A second Empire.
My Empire.
I saw pale princes with hair like the night, six-fingered princes with violet eyes. My sons. Her sons. Numerous as the stars and deathless. A dynasty of half-gods, and I—half-god myself—a sovereign eternal. For ten thousand years I reigned. My ships crashed across the void, established beachheads in the Clouds of Magellan. In Andromeda. Triangulum. Pegasus. The Chantry was overthrown, its copper domes shattered, and in its place my priests erected spiral ziggurats upon whose summits Bassarids in cloth-of-night offered sacrifice to the gods—my kin.
A million years I reigned, ten million years.
“You think I want that?” I said, who had lived long enough already.
Each night she came to me, her beauty and her lust like strong wine. She was advancing even then, drawing nearer by inches, her heavy, white limbs raised toward me, her red mouth like a venomous flower. Eternal life lay in that embrace, and between those thighs there lay the very font of empire.
Nusuq.
Her hands were on my face, her fingers in my hair. She pressed that face to mine, and her lips and tongue were cold as ice. My eyes were closed, and though I was not conscious of my will’s rebellion, I felt my hand cup one frigid breast. Hands slid along my chest, my biceps, fretted the band of my trousers. One closed upon my wrist, another grasped my half-forgotten sword.
I felt her tears once more upon my cheek.
There were too many hands.
“No!” Some part of me rallied and shoved the beast away.
Don’t be afraid! came that inhuman voice. Ushara’s voice. For the first time it spoke to me in words I could comprehend.
But I was glaring at her, a sick hole opening in the pit of my stomach—for in that moment my eyes were open, and I beheld the Watcher in all its terror and majesty, piercing her every illusion with the eyes the Quiet had given me. I saw her loveliness for what it was: an artifice, a mask, a veil over corruption. Beneath that icy flesh, innumerable arms writhed, twined about a core I could not see. Beneath them, curled up immeasurably small, folded along dimensions even my second sight could scarce perceive, were the withered membranes of incredible wings, numberless as the arms. And her eyes! So many eyes peered out at me from beneath the snow-white flesh of arms and thighs, gazed at me from the flat plane of her belly, from within that cold, immortal breast.
I held their gaze for only a moment, sensing her malice, her pain, her angry desperation. Ushara had languished upon Sabratha for nigh on a million years, too weak to slip away into the Dark. But she was stronger now. Seeing her then, I knew . . . we should never have come to Sabratha. Another thousand years . . . a million . . . and the beast might have burned itself out. But our coming there had fanned her embers. She was smoldering then, and unless I could escape—unless I could arm the Perseus and destroy her and myself along with her—she would blossom into new and sudden flame.
Seeing her then in all her alien horror, I ran. It did not matter that I could not escape, did not matter that it had bent space itself to bring me back to that pantheon. It only mattered that I tried. I reached the base of Valeriev’s tunnel, leaped the torn body of a Cielcin lying dead there. With every step, I expected to feel the grasp of countless hands, to see the roof hurtling toward me.
Instead, I reached the spot in the tunnel where the excavation narrowed, and I had to squeeze myself between Valeriev’s pylons, where I should have found a stretch of cramped corridor, a few hundred feet from end to end. Beyond that lay a straightaway that ran to the open-faced pit with the cranes at the surface. Instead, I found myself upon a broad shelf of stone that opened to either side. A fresh wind scoured my face, carrying with it the scent of burning. I stood upon the heights of the Mount of Whales, looking out over the glowing desert and the fires of our ruined camp.
Even as I emerged from the mouth of the tunnel—dazed and disoriented—I saw one of the remaining aquilarii fall burning and streak across the sky. The lighter struck the desert beyond the margins of the camp, erupting in a nimbus of red and golden fire. Great lights flashed in the void beyond the curtain of night, lighting the dust clouds that floated on Sabratha’s upper airs from above with shades of blue and white where Lord Hulle’s fleet engaged the Cielcin moon.
The battle had not ended.
How many men were dying that very moment? There were yet hundreds in the camp, must have been thousands in the planet’s pitiful defense fleet. Yet there were fewer than fifty thousand men on all Sabratha—barely half the number that had gone with me to Eue and were lost.
So few.
Too many.
If I could not stop the Watcher there, every life on Sabratha would be lost. And if it could escape Sabratha . . .
The wind guttered, changed direction, blew toward the Mount of Whales from over the camp. I heard screams and shouts of pain. There was music on that wind, the same beautiful, terrible music I had heard in the bowels of the Earth. The song of the Watcher awake and freed.
I had come to the precipice, to the very edge of doom. Below the plateau and exposed fascia of the ruins fell sharply, a thousand feet or more to the desert sand. Clearly I could see the avenues of Phanamhara radiating like the ribs of a lady’s fan.
There was no way down.
I could not go back, would not go back into the bowels of the mountain, would not go back to face her.
The alien music drew nearer, so lovely and terrible and so very sad. I looked round, and saw her standing not ten paces from me, upon the edge of the cliff, skin luminous in the light of flame and star. She turned to face me, revolving on the spot, without any twitch of limb or motion. Her hair was untouched by the wind, spilled almost to the ground. She did not seem to breathe, and though she did not move her feet, she advanced, space slithering around her as she approached.
Something swallowed the light from the burning camp, and looking out over the precipice I saw her again, standing in the open air. And again! Once more I was surrounded, once more there were six of her, tightening as fingers tighten to close some almighty fist. Just then the ground lurched beneath my feet, and I was lifted up into the air, dragged skyward. The six figures of Ushara floated up into the night about me, closing in until their faces and their breasts pressed against my body and they became the fingers of the mighty hand that had for aeons moldered in the pantheon.
Lightning surged about me, blue-hot and deadly, and I was carried up into the night. So tight were the fingers that held me that I barely chanced to breathe. A shadow stooped over me, and loomed over the Mount of Whales entire. Looking up it seemed to me a cloud parted, and a face peered down at me. A single, lidless eye. It blinked and there were two—three! The face from the hypostyle peered down at me from the clouds. Three eyes vast as moons stared down at me, and the light of their vision was like a flame.
There was nothing—nothing but my Jaddian coat and the thin skin of my eyelids to separate me from the Watcher Ushara’s pitiless gaze. She had offered me wonders—offered me even herself—and I had refused her!
I forced myself to look, to meet that gaze.
I could see nothing but those eyes, red rimmed and furious, hear nothing but a noise like thunder filling my mind. I saw my empire spreading once again, saw galaxies burning, and races unnamed and numberless bending the knee before the banner of my red star. I knew, knew the beast still wanted me.
No.
I could not even speak the word. The hand that crushed me had driven all the air from my lungs, and the world was growing dark. Only those eyes remained, lamplike, undimmed, pitiless. I was dying, dying . . .
No!
With my last, desperate gasp, I saw the breadth of time, saw the Watcher stretched across the manifold potentials like a serpent, stretched across time itself to strangle me. But the planes of time were like the pages of a book, like panes of glass stacked together—Ushara a beam of light shining through them. I had only to choose, to break the time cross which she stretched to break her, to scatter her radiance as a prism scatters light.
I chose, collapsed the prismated reality about us, splintered the very time through which she swam.
The effect was instantaneous, like switching off a light.
The Watcher roared, recoiled, withdrew her hand from our mere spacetime.
I was falling, tumbling though clear night air. I had no repulsor harness, no parachute, saw no Irchtani winging to my salvation. A cry escaped me, and the desert hurtled up to embrace me one last time. Innumerable Hadrians plummeted through the air, all of them dropped by the wounded god. I saw them striking stone, sand, dying one by one where they struck earth.
One hears stories of men who survive such falls, men who fall from aircraft or starcraft and strike the earth unscathed, walking away without any seeming hurt. Such miracles are made possible by mere chance: by some virtue of the ground they land on, by some quirk of bodily mechanics.
I saw one such Hadrian, chose his path, and so struck the ground in a tumble. My fall clipped the edge of a dune, one of the berms that encircled the dig, its steep face sloping back toward the ruins, held in place by static compactors. I rolled along it, slid for perhaps half a hundred feet until I washed out on the floor of the dig. My chest was heaving, and for a long moment I lay with my back on the earth, looking up at the sky.
I had wounded the god.
I rolled onto my side, winced as sand filled the cut on my left palm. Shoving my sword into my pocket, I keyed my wrist-terminal. “Neema!” I almost bellowed. “Albé! Annaz! Cassandra! Anyone? This is Marlowe, can you hear me?”
The hiss of static greeted me and I made to hurry up the slope.
“Can anybody hear me? This is Hadrian Marlowe! I repeat!” I looked back up at the Mensa and the night sky. The Watcher had vanished, but I knew it was not dead. I had to reach the camp, the Rhea. I had to prime the Perseus weapon.
If I was right—if I had truly harmed the creature—there was a chance that I could make it back up the slope and through the camp to the landing field. But where was Cassandra?
I lingered in the path a moment, torn between the camp and turning back. I could not have long. My power had wounded the Watcher, but I had no way of knowing how long the beast would lick its wounds.
In the end I shook myself, and turning made my way up the slope. Sabratha quaked beneath me as I went, shaken to the uttermost foundations of stone. Twice I fell and struck my knee, slipping on the sanded stones. The sound of distant gunfire, of the clash of swords and whine of nahute, all washed down the slope from above.
“Lord Marlowe?”
At first I thought the voice had issued from my wrist-terminal, and I halted to call into it.
“Lord Marlowe!”
A man’s face peered out at me from the shadowed door to one of the side chambers, a narrow portal half-filled with drifting sand.
I ran toward him, and saw that he was dressed in the desert camouflage of Gaston’s men. He reached out a hand to take me by the shoulder. “I have to get back to the landing field!” I almost shouted as he and two others pulled me inside. “The beast that killed Doctor Mann! It’s here! I’ve seen it!”
But all my manic stammering was silenced.
Someone collided with me in the next instant, arms tight about my neck.
“Abba!” It took me a moment to process what was happening.
My own arms rose on reflex, but did not close about the woman that embraced me. My mouth opened, but it was a moment before the words came out. “I . . . ” I swallowed. “Cassandra?” My arms closed at last.
Only then did I truly realize that I had thought I would never see her again.
“What happened to you?” she asked, face pressed against my neck. “I thought you were right behind me.”
With gentle hands, I held her at arm’s length, studied her precious face. “You’re not hurt?”
“No more than I was,” she said. “I’ll be fine, I . . . what happened?”
“The Watcher,” I said, looking up. “I only just got away.”
“The Watcher?” Her eyes shone in the dimness. I could hear the fear in her tone. She alone of all the men on Sabratha had seen the Watcher Ushara—unless I counted Gaizka, who at any rate was not a man.
“What are we going to do?” A new voice intruded, and looking round I saw a haggard man in brown and dun seated on a bit of broken stone. It was Tiber Valeriev, looking like a man beaten by thieves in the alleys of some dark city. He hugged himself, and I did not doubt that he had seen horrors of his own that night.
As I turned to face him, the rest of the chamber came into focus. Much of it was collapsed, and crumbled blocks and boulders of green stone littered the shattered floor. Sand lay mounded in the corners of the room in mighty drifts, deposited by the ceaseless winds. Perhaps two dozen men and women huddled there, some soldiers in their homespun cloaks and desert camouflage, some workers of Valeriev’s own team. One woman wore striped pyjamas. Another man wore no shirt at all, but clutched a plasma rifle as though it were a blanket.
“You can’t stay here,” I said. “The Cielcin are in the ruins.” I did not add that there was worse afoot. These poor people were scared enough without the knowledge of Ushara. “Take these people out into the desert, as far from camp as you can. Go now!”
“Go where?” asked one woman, standing. “The motor pool is burned! They wrecked our fliers! Our skiffs!”
“Just get clear!” I almost shouted. “I’ll send someone to find you . . . after.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Tiber Valeriev.
I did not answer at once. The sounds of gunfire echoed from outside. Some of Gaston’s defenders had found—or been found by—the enemy. I listened a moment, head cocked to one side.
“What are you going to do?” asked Valeriev again.
“What I came here to do,” I said.